Zipcar review - the car of the future?

I rented my fourth Zipcar last week so I thought it was about time I shared my views on the service. At a basic level, ZipCar is car rental without the office, the line of people, the paperwork and the deliberately confusing pricing nonsense that means a $29 car usually costs about $50 unless you want to take on the burden of the entire General Motors pensions debt. Best of all, it provides a crystal ball gaze into the likely future of movement services, which could well evolve over the coming years based on new technologies that know where you are, where vehicles you want to use are and has ways of authenticating you to do so. We call this the digitization of movement.

Unlike, say, Alamo, which considers itself to be a rental arm of the US steel industry, Zipcar understands itself very differently. The company's marketing describes its purpose like this:

"We are committed to improving the quality of urban life. Zipcar's service gives city dwellers freedom to use a car to run simple errands like picking up groceries and buying home supplies, to get out of town for a weekend adventure, to visit friends and family or to travel for business."

How it works

I'm not going to go into the history and tariffs as all that is documented well elsewhere.  All I'll say is they started up in 2000, and claim to have 3,000 vehicles in 23 cities in three countries - the US, Canada and the UK. You can rent a Zipcar in the UK from £4.95 per hour (or £45 per day) for a Toyota Yaris, up to £7.50 per hour for a BMW 318. So a reasonable start, but a tiny drop in the ocean of rental cars.

And the cars are all interesting - £5.95 an hour (£55 per day) will get you a MINI Cooper or you can try a Civic Hybrid for the same price. There are practical options like Toyota Versos, too, for lugging lots of stuff about. In San Francisco I've driven a Ford Mustang and, twice, a Volvo S40, perhaps the perfect drive on the Bay Area's nasty bumpy freeways.

For people like me (and especially Joe, who is, as you may know, a car obsessive), ZipCar's biggest attraction is that you can choose exactly what car to rent. I hate renting bad cars - I almost bribed a man in Ibiza recently to loan me a Fiat Panda rather than a Kia Piccanto. So Zipcar is like giving me a big box of chocolates.

"Zipcar is like giving me a big box of chocolates... you can choose exactly what car to rent."

So how do the basics work?  Well the first issue is you have to get set up to use the service, so they can send you a Zip card. But it only takes a few minutes and the card literally becomes your key to any vehicle you rent, anywhere in the world. It's a plastic credit card, similar to (for London viewers) an Oyster Card. You walk up to the car you have reserved, place the card over a receiver at the top of the windscreen and the doors pop open. The car key itself is tethered to the dashboard, and I'm assured the car won't move without being opened by the Zipcard, so thieves can't zip off, so to speak The best bit is I registered in London (where a nice lady called me and did a three way call with the UK DVLA authority to check my driving record) and bingo, card arrived next day in post and I can now use it to unlock cars in Kensington, Greenwich Village or the Mission district in San Francisco. That's impressively global systems integration. If another friend is a Zipcar member, they can even drive the car you have rented, provided you are with them.

You don't pay for fuel with a Zipcar. Instead, you fill up and show the garage attendant a special fuel charge card. This works great.  An upside for drivers, and questionable one for the environment, is that you can drive hell for leather and not worry about fuel economy. This might seem a retrograde step but frankly the cars are all pretty efficient so ragging the backside off a MINI (or Prius) isn't exactly going to start toppling extra glaciers into the sea. I must admit to a secret desire to rent a Prius and then see how fast I can go. The test of a truly efficient car is, after all, the ability to gain momentum and then use it, as anyone who has passed a Peugeot 205 driven by a psychotic French farmer will attest.

Every Zipcar has a home parking space, which stays empty (and remains available for your free use) when you're renting the car. The company has been smart about deciding where to locate vehicles. You can't rent a Zipcar at the airport - wisely, because that's a market sewn up between too many existing companies. Instead, cars are located in urban areas where parking is often at a premium and people live and work. In London, Zipcars are scattered around areas such as Chelsea and Kensington, notoriously iffy places for public transport, with a high density of well off people and a shortage of residents' parking. They've clearly really thought it through. In San Francisco, I've been able to choose from lots of locations inside the city.

While ZipCar's rates seem relatively high for more than a few hours, they do include fuel and - in London - the congestion charge, which immediately saves £8 ($16) per day. You reserve by the hour using a very intuitive interface. Unless it's a full day rental, you can cancel up to a couple of hours before hand, and extend your rental period online or on the phone while you are using the car, unless it is booked immediately afterwards.

Issues

A problem with ZipCar is the reliance on people being courteous. Cars are not given a once-over between rentals, so you are asked to keep the car clean, fill it back up with fuel and report any damage. This is all fine in practice but probably a bit naive in reality. I can't help thinking that a more social rating type system needs to be employed underneath, perhaps with greater transparency about who has rented the car, to encourage people to behave courteously. Still, in my experience I only had a problem with a Mustang which lacked its drivers manual and had a small dent.

"The Zipcard literally becomes your key to any vehicle you rent, anywhere in the world."

Which brings me to the other weakness. Unlike London-based Streetcar, which has an interface on the console that allows you to communicate to StreetCar base, Zipcar gives you a number to call or asks you to extend bookings online. This would be fine in London, but when I am in the US, calling a tollfree number from my roaming rip off T-Mobile phone is akin to me throwing dollar bills out of the car window.

The future

What next? The company is keen to rent parking locations, which is a nice way for people to make money out of a space they may have, while providing themselves with an on-the-doorstep car they can rent. As proven by StreetCar in London, it can appeal to property developers, too, who can get planning permission with less parking spaces, provided a car share is included. An obvious development would be to consider letting people put their own cars into a Zipcar-style system. While this might sound strange, it would allow car owners to make money out of their cars when they aren't using them and help tackle the problem that our cities are largely filled with vast numbers of parked vehicles, adding no value apart from filling valuable space that would otherwise be pathways along which people could move.

Zipcar's system provides most of the basics, although it might be that cars are loaned between members of social networks, such as Facebook. That would help promote the more community-minded, look-after-it-won't-you, mindset that Zipcar is after.

Car rental has never been so fun. Personally I've developed an obsession with Zipcar Volvo S40s. Minis look nice in San Francisco but you'll lose your teeth on the freeway.

Another downside to Zipcar is that you can't benefit from parking in other Zipcar spaces around a city, which may have been vacated by someone renting a vehicle. A better system of utilising that space would be interesting, and perhaps an expansion of the current system, which operates on an A to A method (you have to return the car to where you picked it up) expanded so that renters had the option to rent at A and return to B – as some newly proposed hourly car rental schemes are offering.

Another obvious step is to integrate other kinds of vehicles into the Zipcar system. Conventional bicycles, electrically-assisted bikes and Segways are some good examples. This would turn Zipcar into something more akin to an integrated transport service. Certainly this would make for a very practical mix in London, where parking in many areas is now extremely expensive (more, in fact, than the price of an hour's car rental).

Of course the great question for those of us working on the next generation of mobility services is does Zipcar make any money. I hear through sources that while the service is growing at a fair clip, profits might not be part of the current package. Oh how much easier life would be if companies like this found a way to share some of their core business model and performance data, so new sectors such as this could settle on a pattern that works, and expand more quickly.

And the ultimate step for Zipcar? Well I'd start renting Tesla roadsters next year, certainly on the US east and west coasts. Imagine - everyone who wants to try a Tesla can rent one by the hour. Tesla gets its cars into lots more hands, while the drivers pay for the privilege. And each car has a high performance charging station at its parking space.

Carpe diem I say.

Mark Charmer is director of The Movement Design Bureau.

Comments

[joe]

Yea it has reached a tipping point - I am a 4 year member that is hanging it up this year - it is cheaper now that insurance has come down and cars are cheaper than ever - we bought a used subaru and it will cost us half the price that zipcar cost us in the last 3 years... there goes their "model" - it's mostly college kids using the cars and they do all the things they are not supposed like smoking and cat hair all over the car or the trash they leave behind and NOW MORE THAN EVER I get into a car to find it on "E" - then I fill it up and the next time I use the same car it's empty again - thanks for the fun zipcar but our time has come to say goodbye...

[Ritesh]

Interesting summary. I just found about it and thought of registering. But, most of the time, I need car only to drive from point A to point B, which currently they don't allow :( . So I guess, it's of no use for me.

[Charles Desmarais]

This is definitely not a cheap service - costs considerably more than Alamo or Budget in New York City. And the cars - when you can get one - are always dirty, often with warning lights blazing on the dashboard. Customer service is terrible - when you get someone on the phone (and there is a CHARGE to speak to a live person) they will blame the computer system for mix-ups. They left us stranded 50 miles from home and said it was because the computer determined that midnight May 30 is the end of May - and the human on the line could not override the error!!

[Claire]

C'mon, it says right on the website...the only time they charge us 3.50 is when they make a reservation for us! It's not to talk to an agent. I hardly think it's their fault that you reserved the vehicle wrong.

I've had a fantastic time with zipcar.

[Abz]

Iv used zipcar a few times now in central london, the idea is good however the customer service is generally quite poor. The cars are always dirty, everytime you get to a car you have to report it, it will usually have a dent, will be dirty which you have to report - that takes up 5 minutes of your booking time If your late even by a few minutes there is a £35 fine, considering london Traffic its difficult to judge.