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Communications Wireless Networking The Internet Transportation

Driver Stranded After Connected Rental Car Can't Call Home (arstechnica.com) 311

Over the weekend, tech reporter Kari Paul from The Guardian got stuck in the California boonies by the Internet of Things. Ars Technica's Jonathan M. Gitlin reports: Paul had rented a car through a local car-sharing service called GIG Car Share, which offers a fleet of hybrid Toyota Priuses and electric Chevrolet Bolt EVs in the Bay Area and Sacramento, with plans to spend the weekend in a more rural part of the state about three hours north of Oakland. But on Sunday, she was left stranded on an unpaved road when the car's telematics system lost its cell signal. Without being able to call home, the rented Prius refused to move.

Adding insult to injury, Paul's cellphone was not similarly troubled by the remote location, allowing her to express her frustration, but also to talk to GIG's customer service to try to get the car back in motion. At first, the company's plan was to send a tow truck to tow the Prius a few miles closer to civilization, but that would be too easy. It appears GIG's customer service unhelpfully suggested Paul and her companion spend the night sleeping in the car and trying to start the car again the next morning. Instead, after a six-hour wait and not one but two tow trucks -- the second of which Paul called herself -- plus 20 (!) calls to GIG, the problem was finally solved in the early hours of Monday morning.

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Driver Stranded After Connected Rental Car Can't Call Home

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  • by franzrogar ( 3986783 ) on Wednesday February 19, 2020 @05:19AM (#59742156)

    Quotation: "It appears GIG's customer service unhelpfully suggested Paul and her companion spend the night sleeping in the car [...] the problem was finally solved in the early hours of Monday morning."

    So... the customer service were QUITE RIGHT after all...

    • The perils of the GIG economy.
      • by MrNaz ( 730548 ) on Wednesday February 19, 2020 @06:21AM (#59742232) Homepage

        The perils of the own nothing, depend on big faceless corporations for everything economy.

        • Yes, no one should ever rent anything. If you can't afford to buy it, you should just resign yourself to not ever having it, like a good poor person.

  • by Kokuyo ( 549451 ) on Wednesday February 19, 2020 @05:22AM (#59742158) Journal

    If I were to suggest just leaving the car there and calling an uber, how liable for damages would you be?

  • by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday February 19, 2020 @05:24AM (#59742160)
    All this stuff is vulnerable to glitches, vandalism, extortion, and war. Turns out that the sci-fi writers have been right for decades.
  • by nicolaiplum ( 169077 ) on Wednesday February 19, 2020 @05:26AM (#59742162)

    How do you tell if your rental / loan / car-share / gig economy vehicle has unreliable Internet of Shit Things in it?

    Car fails if a cellular network fails is not what I am looking for in my transport.

  • Lack of design? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by misnohmer ( 1636461 ) on Wednesday February 19, 2020 @05:27AM (#59742166)

    Sounds like the product was not actually designed before it was coded, or this use-case would have shown up as an important one, as it can jeopardize safety or even life. But hey, who needs design nowadays, let's just start coding and see what valuation we can get, right?

    • Re:Lack of design? (Score:5, Interesting)

      by Njovich ( 553857 ) on Wednesday February 19, 2020 @05:51AM (#59742198)

      This is nonsense, I guarantee you that it wasn't a 'coder' that came up with this feature. Either there was some error, or the business decided to instruct the software developers to create it this way. I would say the current problem in business is the exact opposite, any concerns from developers would be entirely ignored.

      • Yep. I've been developing telematic systems for 15 years for several companies. There is no way the developers wouldn't have realised that there could be a reception outage.

        • Yep. I've been developing telematic systems for 15 years for several companies. There is no way the developers wouldn't have realised that there could be a reception outage.

          So, developers don't live on this planet? Where cellular outages can and do occur?

          It really amazes me how some of these humans perceived as "smart" have absolutely zero common sense.

        • It was probably a case of the software doing what it's supposed to do by flagging this as a potential theft case because the car went to a rural area and went out of coverage for a period of time.

          The car going out of coverage alone isn't a big deal, provided its last known coordinates are in its home/urban area -- think of an underground ramp in a city, there's no reception there, but the theft chances are mostly low because it hasn't been taken far from "home".

          it's probably an edge case they didn't think a

        • There is no way the developers wouldn't have realised that there could be a reception outage.

          But they didn't care anyway?

        • by jythie ( 914043 )
          Which is why I suspect this was not a simple case of the car shutting down due to no cell coverage, but instead some kind of cascade failure where the lack of coverage prevented the system from recovering.
      • This is nonsense, I guarantee you that it wasn't a 'coder' that came up with this feature. Either there was some error, or the business decided to instruct the software developers to create it this way. I would say the current problem in business is the exact opposite, any concerns from developers would be entirely ignored.

        Finding out your transportation product becomes immobilized by a lack of internet signal that it obviously depends on should have been a red flag in the design phase. It also should have been discovered in the testing phase. Both were ignored by greedy idiots who may not be running a company for much longer.

      • Well coders dont always think like engineers. It might not occured to do a whatIF on loss of signal. How can I break this? Is a question most engineers ask right out of the gate. Hacker-thinking coders think this way, but not all coders for sure.

    • Re:Lack of design? (Score:4, Insightful)

      by AmiMoJo ( 196126 ) on Wednesday February 19, 2020 @07:04AM (#59742278) Homepage Journal

      These things have been in use for years with cars on finance. If you miss a payment they remotely disable it, even if you are on the highway.

      So they know all about how dangerous and badly designed it is. They just don't care. The product is selling.

      There is no fix anyway. If they made it so that the car would start when it doesn't have a signal that would be an easy way to bypass the system. They can't do anything about cell coverage. What are they going to do, admit their mistake and shut down?

      • Anyone who knows a little bit about ICEs can bypass that stuff in an afternoon, the cell stuff should be used for tracking and reclaiming the vehicles. the day you stop paying, you get visited by the magic towtruck of reclaiming that night.
    • I'd not say it's not designed. But it just assumed the network would be always present, as probably most of the software designers never left parents home and their the mobile network signal always worked.
    • Yep. Think 2factor auth with the rolling code. They could get an xm receiver, not subscribe, but just use its basic broadcast to get the timestamp. Combine that with the uniqueID of the xm transmitter and perhaps another unique id of the vehicle to generate a unique hourly code. Call into support and they give a 1hr override code. Punch it in and you have 1 hr to drive to a non dead spot. Could repeat this 2-3 times worst case.

  • .. cellphone worked but car's network did not. No way that could happen. That thing is a car not just a computing device.

  • by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday February 19, 2020 @05:42AM (#59742180)
    "In the more than 40 times I have used Gig car since August 2019, I had never heard of the RFID card, and that precaution appears pages below the company’s promises to let users “sign up instantly” and “get going”. "A spokesman from AAA, which is the parent company of Gig, apologized by email for the experience. “We are committed to improving our service and customer care, and will assess this situation for learnings,” a spokesman, Sergio Avila, said. “One immediate action is to improve communication to our Members about the important role that Gig Cards play in helping start a vehicle no matter where or when they need to use them before a trip even begins, so they are not dependent on cell service or Bluetooth alone. Our review of this Member experience is ongoing, and we will continue to identify ways to improve.” https://www.theguardian.com/te... [theguardian.com]
  • by Applehu Akbar ( 2968043 ) on Wednesday February 19, 2020 @06:00AM (#59742216)

    Even on busy rural Interstates, there are areas of no cell service. So you're rolling along on, say, I-5 in California and you hit one of those little low spots on the Grapevine where the signal fades out. Does your rental just stop dead in traffic when this hapens?

    • by AmiMoJo ( 196126 ) on Wednesday February 19, 2020 @07:06AM (#59742282) Homepage Journal

      Yes. This has happened before with cars bought on finance where payments are missed.

      The car doesn't usually stop while you are driving, but if the engine stops it won't start up again. So if you are in traffic and the stop-and-go kicks in to turn the engine off while you are stationary... You are stuck in the middle of the highway.

    • by stdarg ( 456557 )

      It probably doesn't turn off the car the second that the signal is lost. It probably also doesn't count time that the vehicle is turned off, so if you park in an underground lot with no signal it doesn't kill the car. It should give you 15-20 minutes of car-on time to get in and get out.

      On the other hand, who knows. This company might be using an existing product like the one AmiMoJo mentioned and they can't customize it. They obviously didn't add an audio warning like "Signal lost, you have 15 minutes befo

  • Two things (Score:5, Insightful)

    by quonset ( 4839537 ) on Wednesday February 19, 2020 @06:45AM (#59742252)

    First. Ha ha! This is what happens when people think technology will solve all the world's problems by being connected 24/7. Just wait until someone takes out the fiber cable for your home network service and you have everything connected. The howls when people realize they can't turn their lights on or off or use their tv to stream a movie will be glorious.

    Second. Stop calling these companies "car sharing". You're not sharing anything. This is a car rental company, the same as Hertz and Avis. You pay a fee to rent the vehicle.

    This is the same stupidity as saying Uber and Lyft are "ride sharing". The person who picks you up was not going to the airport, they weren't going to the same club you are, they're not going to the same grocery store you are. They're a cab company.

    • So refreshing to hear someone else saying this. I'm sure more realize and think it, but nice to hear others say it too

    • by gtall ( 79522 )

      Ancillary to those thoughts but not so much for Uber or Lyft, every company now wants you to be an annuity for them. You don't buy anything, you rent it. Pushing that to the limit, the company wants not just an annuity but a continuous annuity. They want a constant flow of your information they can continuously monetize and get you to pay for the privilege. Interrupt that constant flow, and they come down with the heartbreak of psoriasis and you find yourself stranded without their valuable service. Don't b

    • Calling it ride sharing has always been a sham. This has always been nothing more than a pretense to run a taxi company without having to follow taxi regulations. Taxi's were vastly overpriced due to excessive regulatory costs and that meant it was a market ready for disruption. Problem was that those regulations kept it from being a market that could be disrupted.

      The 'problem' was solved by the marketing department. Call it ride sharing and pretend your not actually running the world's largest taxi company

    • Thank fuck someone brought this up. Where the hell are my mod points? I'm exhausted by new tech companies claiming some vast life hack breakthrough when all they've done is create new words to mean old things. It's not a taxi; it's ride sharing. It's not a rental car; it's a car share. It's not a juicer; it's an artisanal fruit press. We're a goddamned pizza company that burned through $300M making robots that can't make pizza!
    • by DarkOx ( 621550 )

      This is the same stupidity as saying Uber and Lyft are "ride sharing". The person who picks you up was not going to the airport, they weren't going to the same club you are, they're not going to the same grocery store you are. They're a cab company.

      I agree with that Uber and Lyft have used "ride sharing" as mere pretense and they are in fact cab companies but I don't think the idea was ever the person was going the SAME place as you.

      They might not be going to the same club but we are both headed down town.

      They might not work in the same building but we both are in the same office park.

      We both might not be headed to the grocery but we both want to go to the same shopping center.

      That was the idea, being sold. I agree it does not work that way in practi

  • by pz ( 113803 ) on Wednesday February 19, 2020 @06:53AM (#59742266) Journal

    [ snark ]

    I don't get it. What's so special about modern cars (my newest one is 10+ years old) that requires they have an over-the-air connection to operate? Why isn't the default operating assumption that they are wholly independent, and, should a connection be available, additional opt-in features become available? I should be able to turn off / remove the wireless connection from my car without loss of major functionality other than things like software updates, navigation, etc., that obviously require it. Last I checked, turning either electrical or chemical energy into its kinetic form doesn't require the cloud.

    [/snark]

    • It's at least three different reasons, most of which owners won't like:

      1. You can have a roadside assistance program that for most people, works most of the time.

      2. The car can be repossessed easily if you stop making payments, because (there is significant evidence that) it reveals it's location regularly to the car company. If the car gets stolen is often "not their problem" however...

      3. If you abuse the car by doing things such as driving hard or at high speeds, the car company gets informed of tha
      • by gtall ( 79522 )

        They simply monetize your continuing feedback, i.e., where you go, how long you wait there, etc. All is fed into some other company's database which wants to keep you in a loving embrace. And you get to pay them for this valuable service.

      • Having just bought a new car, Ford clearly states on the screen before you say yes to enabling the on-board modem, that they send information about the car and it's use back to the manufacturer when you enable it. Although if the dealer enabled this for you without asking I can see how new owners may be clueless.

        And I disagree with point 3 about driving hard or at high speeds. Maybe your insurance company won't be happy but this will have no influence on the car warranty. If things break they will be rep
      • I think you missed the main point in this case. It's a "ride-sharing" service, meaning, this is somebody's personal car. Giving the company remote tracking and disable gives the owner more confidence it won't be abused.
    • by bws111 ( 1216812 )

      Nothing about 'modern cars' require that. This is not about 'modern cars', it is about a car RENTAL company which added technology to the cars it RENTS to help them protect their assets.

  • Even in the best-covered European countries, there are spots without coverage, If your security system relies on being able to phone home all the time, you need to fire the bright engineer who came up with that brilliant idea.,,

    • Engineer? The engineer would've headdesked repeatedly, pointed out the issues, and only then implemented it anyway, once the boss said so. Your money down a hole, after all..

      I'm voting for the intern in the conference room with a Macbook. That's your suspect!

    • You would put a timer in and a warning that you were out of coverage.

      Anyway, the tools get fancier but the programmers keep making the same mistakes decade after decade.

  • I still want a hard nav system in my car for just this reason. Go up into the hills and lose Waze, and you'll wish the car had a map built in....
    • As a backup, in the google maps app, look for download offline map. You are welcome.

      But you are right to point out that newer drivers never get to develop a sense of direction. Part of learning to drive should require finding point B with only a simple list of turn directions and no map. Making wrong turns should be part of the process to help prepare drivers.
      • Whatever happened to dead reckoning?

        Shit. So, I come from a miltary family, where we learned orienteering as kids in the woods, with and without compasses--and that's big advantage. But how hard is to say, okay, I'm south and west of my desired position this morning, so I'll walk facing the sun, with it about 45 degrees off to my right? If it's night and clear, you've got the Big Dipper up north. If it's whiteout snow, foggy, and raining elephants simultaneously, you might want to consider building shelter

        • by HiThere ( 15173 )

          You do know why it's called "dead reckoning" don't you?

          Granted, going the wrong way in a car won't usually kill you, as it did for fighter pilots off an aircraft carrier.

          • So, I elided the distinction between seat-of-the-pants navigation, which is really what I described, and dead reckoning. Properly in dead reckoning, you're supposed to keep a list or map of how far you've gone, and at what angle, so you can always work out your position or where to go next. But that's work, and I prefer the in-my-head, seat-of-the-pants version.

  • by 140Mandak262Jamuna ( 970587 ) on Wednesday February 19, 2020 @08:18AM (#59742398) Journal
    Let me first give you the good news. Such things happen to only rented things.

    Then the bad news, in a few years everything will be rented not owned.

    • Then the bad news, in a few years everything will be rented not owned.

      They will need to pass a lot of new laws in the next few years then.

      • Then the bad news, in a few years everything will be rented not owned.

        They will need to pass a lot of new laws in the next few years then.

        No problem. The congress critters are exempted from the laws they write. They can be either wholly owned by corporations or rented by them. Either way they will write the laws they tell them to write.

  • by hipp5 ( 1635263 ) on Wednesday February 19, 2020 @08:43AM (#59742498)

    The exact same thing would happen with the car share cars in my city. The car uses a cellular connection to validate your key fob and check that you do indeed have the car booked for this block of time. They are very explicit about this and the limitation that the cars need to be kept in cellular range if you want to be able to start them (once validated, you could drive through an area with no cell coverage with no problems).

    These cars are generally meant to be used to run errands around the city. The validation system is designed to make the intended use case as easy and straight-forward as possible. If you're adventuring to the great wild outdoors, rent a car from Avis or something.

    If there is a story here, it's about poor customer service, not the weak attempt at making it about IoT.

    • by HiThere ( 15173 )

      Sorry, but this is a rented car, not a car-share car, so this *IS* about abusive IoT.

  • by Rick Schumann ( 4662797 ) on Wednesday February 19, 2020 @12:29PM (#59743302) Journal
    Something like this should NEVER happen. You shouldn't NEED a gods-be-damned cellular connection just for your gods-be-damned car to start up and let you drive it!

You can tell how far we have to go, when FORTRAN is the language of supercomputers. -- Steven Feiner

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