When 'Smart Cars' Turn Stupid

It all started with a relatively simple plan: The Guardian journalist Kari Paul would spend Valentine's weekend with her partner in Northern California. To get around, she chose the Gig platform, which offers an “intelligent car-sharing service”. The first part of the trip went smoothly, but once she decided to continue, Kari discovered the limits of hyper-connectivity, our dependence on online services, and how serious the lack of a manual, direct solution can be when you're in a bind...

The convenience of car-sharing

Gig is a California-based startup that rents a fleet of hybrid cars (Toyota Prius and Chevrolet Volt, mainly) to about 65,000 users in the Bay Area and Sacramento regions. It's not the only company offering this kind of service, but its main bet is convenience: with the help of an app, the potential user avoids paperwork and trips to the dealership. You approach the car, pay, unlock it remotely, and drive. That's it.

That's how journalist Kari Paul and her partner began their Valentine's trip. Along the way, they decided to stop at the beach for a quick walk, and when they returned to their car... they discovered they couldn't unlock it. When contacting Gig's customer service, the journalist was told that the cellular network signal in the area (a stretch of California State Route 1 within a 64-kilometer radius) was not good enough to perform the unlock. The only option was to tow the car.

An email sent by Gig at noon (and delivered to Kari's inbox much later) revealed that for security reasons, the vehicles in its fleet must be re-synchronized with the cloud every 24 hours. However, that's not possible when the car is moving, the cellular signal is lost, or the car is more than 80 kilometers from its 'HomeZone'.

The signal was enough for the journalist to narrate her situation on Twitter, but starting the car was impossible. Finally, Gig's tow truck arrived and took everyone back to the Airbnb with WiFi... which was useless, because the unlocking only works with cellular networks.

Kari and her partner had to ask Gig for a second tow and to keep trying to reset the vehicle, but there's another detail: there's a fixed number of daily reset attempts and they had already used them all. Six hours, two tows, and twenty calls to technical support later, the car was completely restarted (there was “a problem with the software”) and put into operation. The final recommendation from support was: “Get out of there - now.”

Damage control and similar cases

Naturally, the company was quick to start damage control. Kari received a full refund for the trip, with an extra $85 credit. But Gig also offers its users an RFID card that allows unlocking its vehicles in areas with low or no reception. The problem is that shipping that card takes two weeks (Gig will give one to the journalist anyway). When she woke up and went outside, the car had already been towed away. One user's headache turned into convenience for another.

And these cases are multiplying. Annie Lowrey of The Atlantic suffered something similar with the Zipcar service. A Reddit user had problems on the famous Golden Gate Bridge a year and a half ago, and the conclusion is the same: beyond the goodwill of technical support, they can't do anything without a stable and quality remote connection. Smart cars that lose their brains along the way, tows, waiting sessions that stretch for hours in the middle of nowhere, and frustration as a service. This is the future, ladies and gentlemen.

Source: The Guardian