When I Took My Zipcar Into the Wilderness • Hacker News Board

Re: When I Took My Zipcar Into the Wilderness

#91

Post by ash » Thu, Sep 05, 2019, 12:05 PM UTC

zaarn wrote: post #84

bt848 wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The bit about the cell phone discharge seems pretty unlikely. A charged car battery has at least 2MJ of stored energy. GSM in its highest-power mobile station state draws 800mW. Add maybe another 150mW for the GPS, call it 1W total. The battery should power such a phone for weeks. You should be able to smell-test this fact by considering that your mobile weighs nothing and runs all day whereas a car battery weighs 20…

Car batteries are generally a starter battery (minus EV ones). They don't like being closed circuit for extended periods of time. A low current is usually allowed (200mW is the top end in my experience), but anything over will, over time, sulfinate the plates in the battery and cause it too loose charge and capacity rapidly. Generally if you want to run a low current device on a lead acid battery, you should use a de…

It looks like Zipcar should have a separate smartphone-like battery to power GSM and GPS.

Re: When I Took My Zipcar Into the Wilderness

#92

Post by userbinator » Thu, Sep 05, 2019, 12:14 PM UTC

mirimir wrote: post #13

baroffoos wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If the battery is flat on the car then you are still pretty much out of luck even if you can get in. The only advantage to being able to open it is to use it as shelter in a emergency situation

That depends on the vehicle. If it's an ICE with a manual transmission, and you can get it moving fast enough, you can pop the clutch to start it. Back in the day, with a ~dead battery, I'd park on a hill. Even without a hill, 2-3 people can generally just push.

Interestingly enough, early automatic transmissions also allowed this, since they had a rear pump that could build up enough hydraulic pressure to power the rest of the transmission without the engine running first:

http://oldcarmanualproject.com/manuals/Buick/1953/Owners/ima...

This feature disappeared in the early 60s for cost reasons.

Re: When I Took My Zipcar Into the Wilderness

#93

Post by surfmike » Thu, Sep 05, 2019, 12:18 PM UTC

Whenever I used Zipcar, I only used the car at pickup, and then always take the key out for any stops during my rental. Would that have prevented this?

Re: When I Took My Zipcar Into the Wilderness

#94

Post by Shorel » Thu, Sep 05, 2019, 12:21 PM UTC

Nextgrid wrote: post #58

dx034 wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Honestly, the ban sounds justified to me. If you know that parking in the garage will lead to a 50% probability of them having to tow the car, repeating this is just unnecessary. It would obviously be better if they could handle such scenarios but ignoring a known limitation to incur cost to others (since you have no advantage as you also can't use the car in this scenario) sounds wrong to me.

Disagreed about the ban. Since when is shitty technology (which any engineer worth their salt should’ve predicted - this is not rocket science) the fault of the customer? Unless they say in bold in their marketing statements “Only drive within cell coverage” the customer isn’t at fault for trying to use it as a normal car (in fact it’s crazy to think that parking in a place with no reception is no longer normal, at l…

I do agree it is not his fault.

But the ban also prevents that particular customer from receiving bad service. Some things are not meant to be.

Re: When I Took My Zipcar Into the Wilderness

#95

Post by roland35 » Thu, Sep 05, 2019, 12:23 PM UTC

seltzered_ wrote: post #33

Friend in Seattle had this experience when trying to use a zipcar truck out of a garage while moving (i.e. Limited time window to get stuff out of one area to another). Ended up calling support, dealing with multiple hours of delays. Despite the issues which has led him to avoid Zipcar these days, he uses ReachNow (now defunct) and car2go (now called ShareNow) regularly and AFAIK ReachNow didn't have these limitation…

This sounds like a pretty common scenario for zipcar and certainly cell phone coverage coming in and out is something that they should be planning and designing for! Maybe a series of one-use pass codes or something like that could help. I always make sure there is a failsafe when I have two microcontrollers talking on the same circuit board! Never fully trust anything external.

Re: When I Took My Zipcar Into the Wilderness

#96

Post by jotm » Thu, Sep 05, 2019, 12:28 PM UTC

awake wrote: post #15

i had a similar experience with Turo. The car would lock and unlock with a bluetooth connection and would not start unless the bluetooth connection was made. I went on a fifteen minute hike about an hour off the main road to see a redwood grove and when I got back the app had logged itself out with no action taken on my part. We had to hitchhike for 4 hours back to a hotel so that I could log in using my Google accou…

Bluetooth? Holy shit, it can barely keep an audio connection, why would anyone use it for something important?

Re: When I Took My Zipcar Into the Wilderness

#97

Post by Marsymars » Thu, Sep 05, 2019, 12:31 PM UTC

paggle wrote: post #46

FearNotDaniel wrote: post #43

If this article is true, Zipcar in the US must work in a fundamentally different way from how it does here in Europe. Every Zipcar I've ever rented, once you've gained access with your card or the app the first time, you have the actual keys in your hand until the end of the rental. You don't need a mobile signal to lock and unlock the car wherever you go, the key fob does that. Of course, in one of the scenarios the…

In the US the keys that are in the car are physically tied to the car with a string. You are expected to use the card to lock and unlock during your reservation

Wow, if I came across that without some prominent warnings, I'd probably assume some kind of key setup mistake and cut the string.

Re: When I Took My Zipcar Into the Wilderness

#98

Post by braythwayt » Thu, Sep 05, 2019, 12:32 PM UTC

dx034 wrote: post #39

cj wrote: post #24

I got banned from using Zipcar last year. I lived in a condo building with an under ground parking lot in SF. A few times I rented a Zipcar and left it parked in the parking lot at my condo building. About 50% of the time, the car would not unlock. In all cases, I successfully contacted Zipcar who informed me the only thing they could do is tow the car (usually 24+ hours later). The parking lot had no cell service. O…

Honestly, the ban sounds justified to me. If you know that parking in the garage will lead to a 50% probability of them having to tow the car, repeating this is just unnecessary. It would obviously be better if they could handle such scenarios but ignoring a known limitation to incur cost to others (since you have no advantage as you also can't use the car in this scenario) sounds wrong to me.

“I ordered the tuna salad every time I ate at the restaurant. About half of the time, the manager informed me that they were out of tuna, and had to send a truck to fetch more.

After a while of this, they banned me from the restaurant for ordering the tuna salad.”

Re: When I Took My Zipcar Into the Wilderness

#99

Post by jotm » Thu, Sep 05, 2019, 12:33 PM UTC

mirimir wrote: post #25

wolrah wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> That depends on the vehicle. If it's an ICE with a manual transmission, and you can get it moving fast enough, you can pop the clutch to start it. This depends on just how dead it is on newer cars. If it's able to run the electronics but just unable to crank enough to start, this can work. If it's dead enough that you can't unlock the doors it's probably also dead enough that the fuel pump, ECU, etc. aren't going t…

Good point. I should have noted that I've only done that with a 60s VW Bug. Just to see, I have turned off and restarted my ~10 year old Civic, going down a hill. But not with the battery disconnected. Maybe I'll try it. Not now, though. Edit: And upon reflection, maybe not. Because I'd have to pay someone to reset the computer. Edit: But wait a minute. If the vehicle is moving downhill, and you engage the clutch in…

The alternator needs to get some decent RPM to generate enough power. You'd have to go downhill quite fast.

Re: When I Took My Zipcar Into the Wilderness

#100

Post by boomlinde » Thu, Sep 05, 2019, 12:37 PM UTC

ivanhoe wrote: post #67

boomlinde wrote: post #54

> Still, cars without reception become vulnerable in a few scenarios: when members lose or do not have their physical Zipcard with them, when they exceed their reservation time or want to extend their Zipcar reservation, or when the vehicle battery dies. That last scenario was the one my family and I found ourselves in, though we did not know it at the time. Can someone change the title to reflect that cell phone rec…

How then do you explain this part: "A similar thing happened to Tom Coates, another Californian and, as luck would have it, an expert in the internet of things. He used a Zipcar to get to the Getty Villa, part of the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles. His mistake was to park in a garage, where his bars went to zero and he found himself stranded as the sun went down and the museum closed and the on-staff security gu…

> How then do you explain this part

All we know from that anecdote is that the car left him stranded in the garage and that he had no cell phone reception. Nothing of what is presented suggest that there is a directly causal relationship between those two circumstances. In fact, to the extent that it's described it's consistent with the situation referred to in the title of this post.

To make an uninformed guess, maybe the car battery drains quicker when cell reception is poor, but that's conjecture based on little information.