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Self-Serve Car Rental
abb_road writes "Claiming 'Web2.0 values meet Brick and Mortar,' BusinessWeek is reporting on an entirely self service car rental company. Zipcar customers make all reservations online or using a cell phone, then use a card-key to pick up their car from the parking garage--no attendants needed. According to the article, one of the other important attractions of the system is transparency; the reservations system allows you to see exactly what cars in the area will be available at what times, and then reserve or adjust your plans accordingly. From the article: 'If the nearest Mini convertible is booked until 3 p.m., the customer might postpone plans by an hour to get it -- or decide the Mazda with a sunroof on another lot will do.'"
The idea sounds cool, but you'd have to have plenty security guards in something as 'auto'mated as that. Plus, what if someone hacked into the server and decided to "rent" a bunch of nice cars?
It's a good idea, and would have been handy many times for me. Why has it taken so long?
We have this in the Netherlands since 1995. I've used it for years. You make reservations through the Internet or phone, and enter the car with your swipe card.
If the nearest Mini convertible is booked until 3 p.m., the customer might postpone plans by an hour to get it
Assuming the person currently using the car drops it back in time....
This Evaluation of ZipCar 8.0 has expired. Please purchase the full version. Press your horn to continue.
Wouldn't it be cool if they took it a step further and copied Blockbuster's "No Late Fees" policy? ^^
City Car Share in the SF Bay area is just like this. Most of the cars for rental are hybrid cars.
...who's going to to try to press you to pay an extra $20/day for the rip-off supplemental insurance on this plan?
Momentarily, the need for the construction of new light will no longer exist.
HOLY SHIT, CAPTAIN OBVIOUS!
Care to share any more of your brilliant insights??
start their engines, its about race time
Where've you been?
"I'd rather be a lightning rod than a seismometer." -Ken Kesey
Though in the early days, you were given a key to open a box at the parking space, which in turn contained the car keys. Nowadays, you are handed out a near-range wireless SmartCard which you use to open the car and activate it (there's some in-car computer). This new system has been implemented at around 2001. And it's nation-wide. (For the curious, it's www.mobility.ch).
Windows is like decaf - it tastes like the real thing, but it won't get you through the day.
The cars are parked in local lots and garages, unattended. Each car has a card reader mounted behind its windshield. If a customer has a reservation for that car during that time slot, the vehicle unlocks when she waves her "Zipcard" at it. The keys are inside.
So they leave the keys in the vehicle in an unattended lot? Just asking for theft.
And since no humans are in the loop, no one inspects the car for nicks & dents when it is returned.
Unless they charge an arm and a leg for insurance, they're going to lose money.
While a fine idea, it's not exactly new. Zipcars have been around for a while. We couldn't have gotten our 144lb TV home otherwise. If you don't need a car everyday, it works out really well. Especially as many employers will subsidize the yearly fee. I think my girlfriend pays $25.00 a year (word to the wise: it's even cheaper if you mooch off your girlfriend)
Although to be fair, it is pretty sci-fi. It's neat to walk up to a car in the middle of a parking lot, wave your wallet over the windshield and climb in.
come for the naked robots, stay for the zombies
There's also http://www.flexcar.com/
"Welcome to a new era in personal transportation. It's called carsharing. You share access to hundreds of Flexcar vehicles, often within a five-minute walk of your home or work. You reserve a car online or by phone, you drive - to a meeting, to run errands, or to hit the lumber yard - and you return, all for one hourly rate that covers gas, insurance and unlimited miles. All you pay for is the drive. How simple and smart is that? Plus, Flexcar is convenient, affordable, reliable, and great for the planet."
I've had Zipcar / Flexcar / Stolencar for years!
But... now it has Javascript!
If you live elsewhere, you're screwed, even if the city you live in is very large and well known. It's been around for 6 years and this is all there is? They're asleep if they think people wouldn't be interested in places like St. Louis that have crappy mass transit systems (I'm still waiting for the light rail line to open near me so I can get to work by biking to the station).
i am a soviet space shuttle
For more info, see the Wikipedia page on Zipcar.
Unknown host pong.
I can't speak for ZipCar, but I've been using City Car Share for about three years now. It's really smooth - there's a garage a couple blocks from my place, it costs $10 a month to be a member, renting a car is about $4 per hour and $0.4 per mile. This includes everything - gas, insurance, all.
/. ) is real far behind.
If you return the car late you get charged a pretty hefty late fee. You ca extend a reservation over the phone, provided that no-one else has reserved that car after you already. If you're running late and notify the office, you get a smaller late fee than you would have if you were just "missing".
It's cost effective if you just need a car for a couple hours, or an evening. If you need it for a day or more, go to a car rental place.
That article (if the summary is correct, which is a dangerous assumption to make on
And after we wipe out all those folks that used to earn a living by doing those jobs we'll tell each other ten years from now that they were jobs that Americans just didn't want.
So what happens if something is "wrong" with the car (broken, doesn't run, is damaged, 3rd gear doesn't work, etc)? What redress do you have to fix the problem? Do you really believe they can solve problems remotely? All problems? What about the missing passenger mirror? Somebody has to fix that eventually, don't they? How about changing the oil? And right now - they rely on the kindness of their customers to wash the car, keep it clean, gas it up, etc. That works great until you get a tragedy of commons situation. And it will happen.
That is just some of the 10,000 reasons I think this is a bad idea and won't fly. There is nothing I hate more than "self service" that doesn't take into account ALL situations the customer might have. Self service is great for simple businesses. But renting a car (and everything that comes with it) is not simple. Things can and do go wrong sometimes. Unexpected situations arise. When you pump your gas, it's a pretty well-defined process. Yes, there are things that can go wrong. But if you break it down step by step, the transaction is simple. That works great for self-service. Now compare that to renting, running, maintaining, managing, moving, and parking a large fleet of highly valuable vehicles. MUCH more complex to run a car rental business than a gas station.
Its the same reason I absolutely fucking hate the stupid self serve checkouts at grocery store. In simplest terms: they are ALWAYS half-baked solutions that are not ready for primetime and I wind up wasting MY time trying to make the simplest transaction happen (pay for my G**DAMN food and go home!). It rarely works smoothly and a solid 50% of the time, some "assistance" is needed. Yet they have no one stationed there to assist you. Brillant!
Zipcar is great in concept until you have to deal with the actual company. They have a couple of limited formulas in play as to how to attain profitability, and fines definitely factor in there. Not report cat hair you didn't notice on the back seat? Surprise, you get a huge cleaning bill and if you dare to question, your account is yanked. Hopefully these types of services will be regulated somewhere down the road.
To me it's worth the money I would have spent on a cab to have them pick me up.
Why not just go to enterprise pay $20-30?
I like that they wash the car, do an inspection and pick you up for free. Also if I'm late, I just get charged a new rate.
Here the company is a consumers' co-operative too, so you get low rates and get any profits back as rebates.
Zipcar is popular in my neighborhood in Boston (parking is rare and expensive) and useful for those quick trips to the grocery store, although it's tough to get any trip done in only 1 hour, so the minimum trip cost is probably close to $20.
It is *much* more expensive than even Hertz if you are going to take a long trip: the first 100 miles are free, but the per-mile charge thereafter is very high.
I signed up, thinking I would use it for my 1-week-a-month in Boston, but turns out to be cheaper to rent a car from Hertz for the week, especially after you factor in the savings of the $25 each-way cab fare.
What's to stop dodgy companies (like Easy-Car in the UK) from pretending you caused damage to the car? If no-one's there to check the car with you after you've finished isn't that going to be a bit of a problem?
Similar to this, is Communauto in Québec. You can place a reservation via the Phone or the Web, and can now take the car anywere. You only have to pay an hourly fee (~2$) and something around 9/km. There also a small annual fee (35$). But they pay the gas, insurances and all the rest.
To help fund the company, they ask for a deposit of 500$ which they reimburse when you unsubscribe. This might change though as there are looking for ways to make it more accessible to everyone.
We are near 10 000 members over all Québec and they have over 325 cars throught out the nation. It is my alternative to buying a car!
Pierre-Luc B.
Does anyone remember the days (before I was born) when companies hired employes to serve you at gas stations and other such places? How things have changed...
Zeta Gundam TV show (aired in Japan from 1985-1986) has depicted this in the 80's. People are shown hopping into a "empty car" parked on the road side and are ready to go after swipping their ID card.
ELOI, ELOI, LAMA SABACHTHANI!?
Do you have to return the ZipCar to the same garage you picked up at?
I used to use Zipcar and no one cleans the cars. They have a non smoking policy and since I'd always use the same car,I found that it often stunk like smoke and was full of ashes. And then there was the time someone melted a chocolate bar on the drivers seat and I had to sit on a newspaper my whole trip. I did not have a pleasant experience with them.
Things like "surprise sex" and "self-serve car rentals" have both been around for a while.
Zipcar's been around since 2000:
Part-time wheels: City dwellers share cars through new service
By HEIDI B. PERLMAN
Associated Press Writer
637 words
23 June 2000
08:29
Associated Press Newswires
English
Copyright 2000. The Associated Press. All Rights Reserved.
BOSTON (AP) - It took only a month for the traffic jams, insurance costs and parking woes of Cambridge to convince Katherine Watkins to sell her car when she moved from Kentucky.
But after two years riding the bus and taking cabs, she finally broke down and got a car again. Sort of.
Watkins is a new member of Zipcar, a service that allows her to share a car with more than a dozen other people for $4.50 an hour.
"My cat was sick and I had to bring her to the vet, and it was just too much to do in a cab," she said. "I finally decided I really do need a car, just not all the time."
Zipcar, based in the Boston suburb of Cambridge, caters to drivers such as Watkins, who like the convenience of having a car but don't like what it costs to maintain one in the city
Wordnik, a dictionary project which aims to collect
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Car_sharing
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flexcar
Previously: "Linux... Toward the Sunrise..." Now: "Linux... Toward the-- No, now, part of Every Sunrise"
Really bad rates, I have to pay up front for the privilegde and I can rent a car for 17/day here. How much did the ol Burrito get for this advertisement?
I'd go on a Vegan diet but the delivery time from Vega is too long. --brownkitty
Traditional car rental companies get a lot (but not the majority) of their revenue from the sales of the optional insurance. Managers and executives are judged and promoted/fired based on these sales. If there are no employees present to scare and badger the customers, there will be no extra insurance sales, no way for the folks to judge each other as salesmen and motivators, and no scapegoats for their other poor business decisions.
Posting anonymously, having seen the inside.
isn't this identical to the flexcar service http://www.flexcar.com/ which has been operating in major cities since 1999.
Seriously, stop using the term Web 2.0. NOW.
If there are no people in the loop, why is it still so expensive? I rent cars frequently when I travel for business and I generally pay about $11/day for an economy model (this is without coupons, specials, or any sort of membership, just the normal rate at one of the big-name chains). $60/day - even for a nicer car, even with gas included - is a pretty hefty premium to pay just for not having to talk to the person behind the counter...
Perfectly Normal Industries
These companies have been around for a long time. This is not web 2.0, just a new hype on old business.
Self-service car rental? GTA: Vice City has been out for over a year now, man.
The above is most likely humour. Slashdot foot icon goes here.
The answer is no. I wanted to use a ZipCar back in March to get from Boston to a little town about 4 hours to the west. They wanted like $50 just to sign up to use their service (a one year membership), plus all the fees for taking the vehicle that day for 12 hours and driving it hundreds and hundreds of miles. They charge you way too much for convenience. It's a shame, because I was quite excited to use their service, but it was just too expensive. I ended up missing a Philip Glass concert and was quite bummed. You'd think having no office or desk would save money. What the hell is their target demographic, anyway?
"First Post" a full four minutes after the article was posted? On Slashdot? You're "special," aren't ya?
More exactly, Car Sharings in Switzerland started 1987. Mobility a merger of two cooperatives exists since 1997.
I use them at great satisfaction! Just go to their website, make a reservation, leave the home and open the car with the card five minutes later. Great! In cities at every time you find a car near you in 95% of the cases.
Wanna have a small one, a transporter or a cabriolet? Voila!
And most importantly, you don't have to to clean, repair, check, change wheels (winther/summer), search and pay for parking place where you live and last but not least you don't have to finance the car yourself.
- Click Das Netz (The network)
- Choose a city you like
- Click zur Stadt (to the city)
- You will see a map. Click on Buchungen aller Autos in
... (Bookings on all cars in ...)
- Now you see all the cars in the city and the times when they are booked. Another click an you are in the booking dialogue.
As a customer you can rent cars all over Germany. It is organized by the biggest railway company in Germany to enhance the mobility of their clients.In Washington DC, I have used competitor Flexcar and generally liked it, but was dismayed by no or slow maintenance on safety-related matters on the cars. One one car, the warning light on a Honda Civic for the Supplemental Restraint System was lit for much of the year, despite notations on the maintenance log to fix it (Flexcar car location 3809). On another, a passenger-side rear-view mirror was broken and missing for two months, despite notations on the maintenance log in the car (Flexcar car location 3934). Plus, the cars were often dirty and littered.
Here it's called Communauto, it's been available for a few years.
:)
http://www.communauto.com/index_ENG.html
My girfriend and I subscribed last fall. It's very convenient, whether it is for a short visit to see Grandma or to stop at IKEA for some stuff...
They also have long distance plans and per-day fees if you want to get the car for a long week-end.
The thing that bothers me a little bit, and this is where it will never having a car of your own, is that you have to plan your trips. You can't just decide on a saturday morning "Hey, let's take the car right now and go someplace nice for the week-end".
But it's really a minor inconvenient, and not paying for a car that would stay in my driveway for 5 days really is good on for the budget, and we can spend that money elsewhere (a colleague of my girlfriend who has a car keeps telling her we seem to go out a lot!)
We are definitely staying with this system. Of course, I don't think it would work as well in cities where public transit isn't well developped.
There are countless organizations that do auto sharing now, similar to rental, but in a pay as you use.
Example:
http://www.autoshare.com/how.html
$6/hr including gas, insurance, etc.
a 'fleet' of cars all around the city.
You book a car, it gives you a code and a location at the time that you want it.
You pick up the car and drop it off in acceptable public parking lots.
It's expensive for a day, but great to get a car to go do groceries or make a trip you wouldn't normally do for downtown folk, such as a business meeting uptown or so on.
-M
when you see the word 'Linux', drink!
Ottawa has a system like this called VrtuCAR http://www.vrtucar.com/
Is that a vague way to refer to "stealing cars"? Oh wait...
I've been using ZipCar for about a year for business. The cars nearest me are parked at a private indoor lot only a few blocks from my apartment, so I never had to brush snow or ice in the winter, which is nice.
Annoyingly, ZipCar tends to charge my credit card for the tolls I incurred weeks after the reservation. Why does it take so long? Doesn't EZPass give them some kind of realtime account? They must have a hundred EZPass tags in this area.
The cars tend to be quite clean. I've never gotten into one and found pet hair or smelled cigarette smoke or anything like that. I once found a few unused napkins in the cupholder, but who cares?
The only real gripe I have with ZipCar is that the card is a little unpredicable when I try to open the cars. Waving it past the sensor doesn't really work. I have to slap it right against the windshield over the sensor, and if the card is even a little bent, it won't work at all. On one of the cars I rented it would only trigger the locks if I tapped the card against the windshield at a 90 degree angle. (Any radio nerds want to explain that to me?)
If Zipcar is Web 2.0, what isn't? This is beyond absurd.
sulli
RTFJ.
St Louis? Where is that?
Lies about crimes
I live in NYC and use ZipCar's service. It's a little misleading to refer to is as a "car rental" service; I'd call it a "scalable car sharing service," at least when talking to geeks. It's best for people who don't have a car at all (and there are a LOT of us in NYC). If you own a car and need to rent while travelling or for a special purpose that your car can't handle (e.g., moving), it's usually cheaper to rent a car from a rental agency. For folks without a car, for many short duration trips, ZipCar is a lot cheaper. What's the difference? Largely, insurance. If you already own a car, your car insurance will usually cover a rental. Rental car insurance can run up to $25/day (which can more than double the daily rate on those $20/day specials). I can reserve a ZipCar on the weekend for $65/day *including* gas for up to 125 miles; and I don't have to travel out of my way to pick up the car or spend a lot of time doing comparison shopping.
I was just driving in St. Louis this weekend. Please, if you happen to meet anyone even remotely related to the synchronization of stoplights there, kick him/her in the shins for me.
Augh. Not a single green light down there. Some of the surrounding towns are alright, but in the city proper...
I don't drive in the city itself often but some of the roads I do drive on have crappy sync. I did read in the local paper that there's going to be at least one project to fix some of the light sync problems. Too bad I don't remember where that was.
You would think that accelerating to the speed limit as soon as you leave a red light would get you greens. But nooooooooooo.
i am a soviet space shuttle
I guess they're relying upon people being able to do the calculus,
and look at it as a deposit rebated across use, and not some kind
of initiation fee. But hey, whatever, your loss. At least you didn't
join back when they first started and a memberhsip was $300 (to cover
insurance). Sure, the hourly rates were a bit lower but you paid for
your mileage too. Personally, I've been a member for 3 years and only
taken a car out twice... but I have no problem with the plan (other
than that I'd like to receive a reminder when the annual fee is going
to be charged).
Were that I say, pancakes?
being a resident of Ohio, I don't think I would see good returns on the "deposit rebated across use", but thanks for calling me out on not being able to "do the calculus". way to instinctually sense my lack of advanced mathematics knowledge ; )