The IT Nerd

You’re likely wondering why I’m talking about a car rental operation on a technology blog. Just hang with me, it will all make sense.

This past Saturday, My wife borrowed the car to help a couple who were setting up the venue that they were having their wedding at the next day. I needed to see a customer and going by Toronto Transit wasn’t an option. So my wife suggested that I rent a Zipcar. Now the idea behind ZipCar is that they specialize in short term rental of cars. So if you only need a car for an hour or two occasionally, you have an option that is affordable. After all, owning a car is expensive if you factor in insurance, gas, parking, and maintenance. Thus this is a good alternative for those who live in urban areas such as Toronto who don’t need a car. Or in our case, we can use this option so that we don’t have to invest in a second car. My wife has been using Zipcar for years, but this was my first time so I was intrigued as to what the experience would be like.

Now I have previously signed up for a Zipcar membership. There are a few options for you depending on how often you think you’d use the service. Check out their rates for Toronto to get an idea. If you don’t live in Toronto,  no problem. Zipcar is Vancouver, many cities in the US, Barcelona, and in the United Kingdom as well. Once you have your membership, which gives you a proximity card that I’ll go into in a moment, you can reserve a car online or you can use their app. In my case, I used the app for the iPhone to reserve a Mazda3 called “Maltez” for 3.5 hours at a rate of $12.50 an hour which includes gas and insurance. Yes they name their cars which is an interesting touch.

Here’s where the app really comes in handy. Zipcar has locations in parking lots, condos, and other places all over town. So you can use the app to find the location of the car that you have reserved. Here’s a picture of the location that “Maltez” is located:

I’ll also point out that the app can help you find rental locations relative to your home address as well as your current location. That’s handy.

Now this location is within walking distance from when I live, and I knew where it was. But if I wasn’t familiar with the area, the app could lead me there using Apple Maps. Oh, for the record, “Maltez” is the blue car on the left.

Now once I am there, the app does another cool thing:

It has a virtual key fob that allows you to lock and unlock the car. This is important because you don’t get a key up front. You use the app or the proximity card that I spoke of earlier (which you place on a reader on the top left corner of the windshield) to unlock the car. They keys are on a retractable string inside the car. At this point, you can fire up the car and drive away. If you need to lock or unlock the car during the trip, use the app or the proximity card. When you’re done, return the car to the place you got it from and use the app or the proximity card to lock the car.

What happens if you need gas? There’s a card inside the car that works with most major gas stations that allow you to get gas without shelling out your own cash. But if you need to pay for gas at a gas station that doesn’t take the card, they will reimburse you.

So, my rental went well. Everything went as I expected and the only criticism that I have is that there was a weird rattling sound inside “Maltez” that I could not isolate. I plan on reporting this to Zipcar so that they can take a look at it as I’m told by my wife that they like feedback like that as it helps them. But other than that, “Maltez” performed well. The only other thing is that I have my Zipcar account set to text message me when I have 30 minutes left in my rental. That way if I needed to, I could text message back to extend my rental so that I could avoid late fees (which by the way is only possible if nobody else has a rental after you). But I never got a text message. I plan on reporting that too.

Here’s the bottom line. I liked my experience with Zipcar. The fact that they have an app that allows me to manage the car is a huge plus. If you want to avoid owning a car (or a second car in the case of my wife and I), Zipcar is an option, and a very good one.

This entry was posted on June 20, 2013 at 8:13 am and is filed under Products with tags Zipcar. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.