I frequently land in places where my connection is but a trickle(with an absurd ping of 20s at that), and because of that a large part of apps simply refuse to work.

One notable exception is Facebook Messenger - if it doesn't work then you really don't have internet.

The browser will attempt to slowly load while the application outright refuses to attempt, and claims it has no connection, even the the browser is loading

It's bad enough having banks rely on a phone system where most carriers are perfectly happy to let anyone who knows your Address, DOB and Mother's Maiden name to port your phone number to a new SIM.

It probably requires less effort (and certainly less risk of discovery) to take over a Skype, Google Voice or other VOIP/SMS service.

Yeah, cell service is not something to rely upon in California!

Vacationing in wildfire regions during wildfire season.

You let your fuel tank get low without knowing when or where your next fillup would be.

You didn't have hotel reservations in advance.

You waited until nightfall to find a room.

You're relying on a smartphone for navigation.

You didn't make offline maps of the whole region on everyone's devices. All of California is only around 2gb in Google Maps. That functionality has existied for a decade.

I have discovered by driving with others as navigators, that a lot of people cannot read a map and are literally just doing what the App says.

If you miss a turn, people are incapable of looking at the map and saying "go one more block and take a left to get back on course". They have to wait for a reroute.

Probably next time you should only express opinion in topics you not only see from the idealistic viewpoint of an outsider.

Or simply not deviate from the topic of bad cell coverage just to criticize someone in something you cannot comprehend fully.

That would be absolutely frustrating. I have no idea how they can keep the confidence of their customers. It’s such an egregious non-starter.

btw, testing is very important and i think most companies don't exhaust enough test cases. had google maps gone bonkers in the country especially during very bad weather. i don't think there is a map app out there that takes the weather into account...

Seems like a useful thing but I don’t see it in Waze, gMaps, or aMaps. Why is that?

Seems like that's available from NOAA for cheap, isn't it?

Are you saying that 90% of rental through phone are made in area without data service?

I'm a big user of Communauto in Quebec, which is a similar car sharing service but does have a key inside (I'm pretty sure they do have the same issue of unlocking the car though, but you take and release the car at the same spot, so the unlock will work at first for sure, and afterward you should keep the key). 99% of my usage with them has been done with data coverage. I only used it once without cell coverage and funnily enough I may have stressed them a bit because I was close to the border and it lasted 48 hours ;).

I'd have to call the customer service line, where they wouldn't know what to do as the car was already in use according to the backend. After a few times getting stuck, I came up with a solution which was to literally beg them to cancel the checkout so that the car was available again. They were trained to not do that as their information was that a car could not be left parked outside their service area, which was definitely not the case as I was able to start a new reservation and unlock the car. This happened quite a few times, so much so that I would already know the solution but had to spend an awful amount of time explaining it to the reps -- starting with uninstalling and reinstalling the app as told by them.

Then, some other company took over the system and started a new system with the same infrastructure and the app codebase. When it happened again a couple times, I was finally able to get hold of a systems programmer who debugged the issue with me while I was out in the wind. It hasn't recurred since.

Just wanted to share this story

Sounds like the new management is less clueless than the previous one, if no one had heard about the problem (and if the cars were - they should be - gps-tracked then the backend should just use that as a position, obviously).

Really need Shibboleet for tech support.

https://xkcd.com/806/

1) you are given (by a human) the keys of the car in exchange of providing your driver license and credit card

2) you do (within limits) whatever you want with the car

3) after the agreed upon rent period you bring back the car and keys (giving them to a human) and then the rental company checks how many miles you did (and if you exceeded the included amount you are charged, unless you got an all inclusive/unlimited mmileage contract)

I.e. the renting company actually "trusts" you (backed financially by your credit card).

And this formula worked seemigly just fine for the last 60 years or more.

A "natural" evolution would IMHO be:

1) you get pre-approved (i.e. you provide your driving license and credit card before and outside the actual rent) when you start the rent your smartphone is somehow allowed to open and start the car

2) you do (within limits) whatever you want with the car

3) after the agreed upon rent period you bring back the car in a designed area, you notify the renter of it and somehow your smartphone cannot open or start the car anymore (and at that time the mileage is checked remotely, etc.)

If this was the case the need for coverage would only be needed in the designed pick and leave area.

I fail to see any practical advantage for the renting company to collect data "realtime" (and thus need the anytime coverage).

I.e. it seems to me more like a "because I can" reason than anything else.

Who wants to bet all their engineering talent was instead spent on playing with big toys like Kubernetes and chasing the latest JS framework?

How has (say) Herz, Avis or Budget managed to survive all these years (and still do)?

Surely rental car theft must be something rare enough to not be of concern (statistically).

Besides, a car is not something designed (by the manufacturer) to be easily accessible, and if professional car thieves are going to target a vehicle, allow me to doubt that the whatever the smart peeps at GigCarShare devised is more effective than the manufacturer's and or additional third party [1] anti-theft devices.

BTW, should the whatever device/system actually be much better than competing systems, they would most probably have much more imcome/profit by selling the devices/systems instead of renting cars.

[1] possibly specialized since a couple decades or more in the anti-theft technology

The problem is when your authentication is an app and a digital photo it’s a lot easier to fake who you are. At least if someone tries to go on a crime spree with traditional rentals they’re gonna be on dozens of office security cams, have to repeatedly show a physical license and have their identity checked, and so on.

They somehow either solved it or it doesn't represent an issue.

What you linked to is possibly yet another kind of crime, the whatever app was seemingly hacked.

You can even drive through the whole country to another Traficar service zone, leave the car there and get back by train.

Live tweet at https://twitter.com/kari_paul/status/1229428892802392064

Ugh.

IoS

It has a nice ring to it. However, I fear for its wider adoption:

https://www.apple.com/legal/intellectual-property/trademark/...

"IOS is a trademark or registered trademark of Cisco in the U.S. and other countries and is used under license."

Uh-oh.

Can see the headline now: Cisco sues budding Internet of Shit (IoS) startup claiming trademark infringement. Plaintiff filings also allege numerous instances of patent infringement, as well as theft of trade secrets.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cisco_IOS

After hours of talking with support, they finally sent someone to tow us to the nearest city. The car then had reception and finally started again.

The car did NOT connect to the phone Hotspot, iirc, and that was one of the things that irked me. If a phone can connect to both wifi and 3G/LTE/whatever, why shouldn't a 50.000$ car? Especially if that car necessitates being online for its function.

> But it turned out it actually needed to be towed ... to the nearest town with cell service.

> I'm a tech reporter. I'm pretty tech savvy.

Having no mitigation at all for the car not reaching the Internet on its cell connection is negligent. Even a hidden screen that lets you put in a one-time use startup code in the case of emergencies would have helped.

1. The car must connect to home via cellular to authenticate/receive updates over some regular cadence (days? hours?) 2. Once that is complete, the user can authenticate over phone to the service via any connection (ie airbnb wifi), then unlock the car with bluetooth 3. The situation here occurred after going beyond cell service range for the car. It tried to connect home, failed, and as a result, refused to honor the phone's unlock the car itself had connected to home over cellular

So maybe went Gig went cheap when choosing a cell partner.

...i...what...but why...that doesn't even make sense?...

>Gig told us we used our “allotted restarts” of the car

why is this a thing? if i rent a car from enterprise etc, they don't care how many times i start the car up, it's paid by time...just seems like yet another needless over-complication

also i wonder if these cars have similar issues in parking garages where cell reception is less than ideal.

From the article

> Basically, a phone unlocks the car using a combination of cell service and Bluetooth. So when you're out of cell range it can be difficult to unlock the car.

> They were unable to ping the car because, I don't know, they hadn't updated, or synced, the software in 24 hours.

My understanding is that it works like scooter and bike sharing services, where you have to have an active connection to their servers to use the vehicle. Of course, while it works in the city where there is 3G/4G coverage, it's not going to be efficient in the middle of nowhere where coverage is unlikely... so sometimes convenience (AKA it's just an app) becomes a hindrance. Who's fault is it? (rhetorical question)

The developer's fault. How this is even debatable is beyond me. Completely failed on the UX level.

You unlock the car with your phone over your data connection and not with a key. Losing the data connection is the equivalent of losing the key. You may not like it, I know I don't, but that's the downside of doing it this way (just like it's a downside to have a physical key because you can lose it too).

I have no doubt that the developers warned management of the risk of doing it this way, they accepted the risk.

The big difference with Evo is it sounds like these don't have the keys in the glovebox. The app is hot garbage, so it comes in handy. Also the RFID cards are standard issue here. I have taken them well out of service for over 24 hours without issue. All this to say, I don't believe it is an inherent limit of the platform. That said, my experience poking around exposed endpoints does not inspire confidence. The back end is some Microsoft abomination. I'd love to know what runs on the in-car embedded device, but it's probably WinCE. Anybody here worked for vulog?

The article seems to imply they are smart cars, but the picture is clearly of a Prius C. I guess they mean smart as in internet-connected rather than the brand from Mercedes.

[0] https://evo.ca [1] https://www.vulog.com/en/

I think that something like "engineering fundamentals" should be a course requirement for computer science majors in case they aren't headed for careers in CS research. Back in my day, at the start of the first day of physics class, the professor showed a video of the famous footage from the Tacoma Narrows Bridge disaster. Then we got down to business.

Some people are okay with occasional tech hiccups as the price of pushing the frontier forward. I hereby thank the brave beta-testers, and hold them above the people who expect perfection the first time out of the gate.

Now if they went for a Death Valley trip in the car that'd have been entirely different story - one of irresponsibility and needless risk taking. But as things were, they suffered only a major inconvenience and no appreciable risk to life and limb, due to maintaining sensible proximity to civilization.

On a lighter note, please consider the histories of Alice Ramsey[1] - first woman to drive cross USA, and Bertha Benz[2] - first woman to drive cross a country, having financed the development of the car. Both encountered malfunctions and other mishaps, solved problems & persevered, and earned fame and appreciation. Both also added to the popularization & development of the technology.

--

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alice_Huyler_Ramsey

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bertha_Benz#First_cross-countr...

My intent was to satirize the incredulity or even outrage conveyed in certain comments; should've chosen a better format for that.

The big difference is, cars back then were far simpler, and more importantly could actually be fixed by anyone with a bit of mechanical skill, which wasn't in short supply at the time.

Modern cars are so complex and computerised that even if you own it, you are still mostly powerless to do anything if something goes wrong, and it could even be deliberately designed to thwart repair by anyone other than the original manufacturer.

Also, there are plenty of old school rental companies that are cheaper and more convenient than these shitty services for these kind of road trips.

Honestly, I don't know what to think. It is surely a bad thing to prohibit people form having cars that stop working when there is no internet available. I am tempted to say I would sue the company with all my might, but rent-a-car companies often sell to helpless people that have a limited time available on a country and can't spare a fight.

Maybe the best option would be to cancel the credit card expense, get another transportation somewhere else, and if the country laws side with the company too badly, mark it off on the no-visit list.

It’s sounds so dangerous! What if they lost internet on a bridge? People could really get hurt.

There's actually system to do this, and I'm also amazed that this is legal. In this case though it's not that, it's simply that to unlock the car it go through a data connection. It won't shut itself, you just won't be able to unlock it without a data connection.

Unfortunately zipcar is declining where I live so I canceled my membership. They removed the zip cars in my neighborhood and I see zip cars around less often in general.

- From the article.

>it's a bit at odds with their 'hop in and go' advertising language. So, I think maybe that's why it's not stressed so much on their website.