Digital car rental service briefly strands customer in the California mountains after poor cell reception kept vehicle from syncing with servers
- A California woman rented a car through the sharing app Gig, which requires cell service to authenticate the rental every time the engine is turned on
- The woman had parked in a remote area without cell phone service for a hike
- When she returned, the car wouldn’t turn on because it couldn’t connect to the company’s cloud servers
A California woman found herself stranded in the mountains after a car she rented through the sharing app Gig stopped working because of poor cell phone reception.
Kari Paul, a technology reporter for The Guardian, was on a Valentine’s Day trip with her partner in Mendocino County, near the small coastal town of Gualala, three hours north of San Francisco.
They pulled over at a scenic turnout and decided to hike down to the beach below for a short walk, but when they returned to their Gig vehicle they found it wouldn’t turn on.
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A California woman became stranded after the car she rented through Gig, a sharing app that serves the bay area and Sacramento, lost cell service and couldn’t authenticate her rental
According to Gig, the car’s internal software needs to sync with the company’s servers to confirm the rental every time the engine’s turned on, even if it’s part of the same rental.
When Paul, who still had a weak cell signal, called the Gig’s customer service, she learned the company often had technical issues in the region she was in, a 40-mile area of Pacific Highway 1 notorious for poor cell service.
Gig paid for a tow company to pick them up and bring them back to the home they had rented for the weekend, but even there Paul found the car couldn’t connect to Gig’s cloud servers, according to a report on ArsTechnica.
Paul attempted to use the rental home’s Wifi to sync the car, but it would only sync via cell phone connection.
Ultimately the couple had to order a second tow truck to bring them back into working cell phone range before they were able to start the engine again.
Gig launched in 2017 and currently offers short-term car rentals in the bay area and Sacramento.
Gig launched in 2017 and lets users take out cars by the minute, hour, or day
Users download the app, enter payment information, and can use their phones to unlock any available cars at ‘HomeZone’ parking areas spread across the bay area and Sacramento, the two markets it currently operates in.
The service, which has 65,000 registered users, doesn’t require any subscription payments and will let users take cars out at a rate of $0.40 a minute, $15 an hour, and $85 a day.
The cars also include FastTrak passes so customers won’t have to worry about paying any local bay area tolls.
Gig offers an RFID card that can be ordered with a rental for an additional charge in cases where the customer knows they’ll be going to areas with poor cell phone service.
Gig offers RIFD cards for customers who know they’ll be going into areas with poor cell phone reception but it’s not something most users are accustomed to having to plan for in advance
For many users, however, driving into areas with poor cell phone service can come as a surprise.
After sharing her story on Twitter, Paul found many other people in the bay area had experienced similar issues, both with Gig and other car sharing services like ZipCar.
In spite of the frustrating experience, Paul says she would still use Gig’s services.
‘FWIW I really like Gig car and probably will still use it for errands around the city that cannot be done by bike (grocery shopping etc) but yeah do not drive it into the wilderness,’ she wrote on Twitter after the event.
