car2go

Excellent customer service in the Vancouver office.
I have emailed them on several different ocassions.
Always a very speedy reply, and a personal touch.
Thanks car2go Vancouver!

A few months ago, I took a car out and just after making a left turn the car stalled. In the middle of a busy road. With traffic, including a truck blaring its horn, behind me. Then, the car kept reversing every time I pushed down on the accelerator. I had to turn off and turn on the ignition several times before the situation corrected itself. Shaken, but deciding it was a one off (I had driven Car2Go cars many times before without incident), I reported it to Car2Go, so they could look at the car before anyone else drove it and I left it at that.
Yesterday, I was in one of Car2Go’s cars and restarted it after having turned it off for several minutes (satellite couldn’t recognize the parking spot). It kept reversing, even though I was in drive (the Car2Go agent I later called kept asking me if I was in drive or possibly «manual») every time I pressed the accelerator. Again, I had to turn off and turn on the ignition a couple of times before it stopped doing this. I call Car2Go just after this happens. The guy says he will report the incident, but when I note that someone has booked this car to be driven in the next 30 minutes, he says there is nothing Car2Go will do to prevent the next person from driving this car, saying, all he had was «[my] word,» and he would have to wait until one of their staff members examined the car. So, in the meantime this next person drives off in this car? Pretty much.
Car2Go, fix this problem before someone gets injured or killed.

Car2Go is an OK service, and when it works, it works well, but it’s obvious they’re dancing right on the edge of what technology allows. My primary use would be driving a car from downtown to my home in Riley Park, or from Riley Park to downtown.
Heading home from downtown the issue is pretty much what you’d expect — After 4pm on a weekday there just aren’t many cars available, with users all fighting over the handful of cars.
That’s fine, I get that, you can’t have infinite cars — But what’s frustrating is when the system shows a car as available and you simply can’t find it. In effect, I don’t believe the app during busy times. It shows a car on Georgia street, allows you to reserve it, but there’s no car there. So now you’re running late, desperately walking this way and that, trying to find the car and it’s nowhere to be seen (in reality I should never have trusted the app in this case anyway — Georgia is no-​stopping after 3pm, so how could there be a car there?) Things aren’t helped by users that obviously know a few tricks to ‘hide’ cars so they can get back to them — So the car may be near Georgia and Bute, but it’s been cleverly hidden in a lane alcove so no one can find it and the user can get it back. For example, I would bet my blue membership card that both these cars are ‘hidden’ -
Heading into downtown in the morning the challenge is where to park the car. You can drive from spot to spot, getting later and later for work, running up the minutes, trying desperately to find a legal parking spot with available parking spaces. Again, I realize this is out of Car2Go’s control (the City of Vancouver should allow free parking at meters that have no stopping restrictions), but the fact remains that with dozens and dozens of cars heading downtown in the morning with no parking it makes it difficult to use the service.
Finally there’s the issue of Parking Tickets. I’ve picked up two Cars2Go in the past month with parking tickets due to the previous renter — With nowhere to leave the cars, and running late, they’ve obviously just left them at a meter, gambling someone else will grab the car.
What do I do with a ticketed car? Pass it over? I’m desperate for a car, so that’s not going to happen. Push the «SOS» button? It’s not an emergency, so why press SOS? Call them? There’s no phone number on a sticker in the car. So I’ve just left the tickets sitting the car, ready to puzzle the next renter.
Bottom line is that if you want to drive from neighbourhood to neighbourhood (Riley Park to Kerrisdale) the service is great, but to/​from downtown it’s far from ideal — And I guess in Car2Go’s defense, there’s not much they can do about that unless a) the city frees up more parking, b) they buy hundreds of more cars and c) mapping technology gets hyper-​accurate, or there’s a camera pointing front and rear in the car to show you exactly where it is.

My relationship with C2G may have had a rocky start, but I truly can say that they powered through their growing pains and are now one of my favourite services that I use in the city on a regular basis. Yes, sometimes I may find myself in a C2G desert, and have to hike quite a ways to find one, but this is happened less and less often compared to C2G’s early days.
I’m loving the C2G app, and love how you can now start your rental from your phone. This is awesome if you happen to be without your card, but desperately need a car. I really appreciate C2G’s efforts to constantly expand their service to meet their customers’ needs — I see this as they are always adding more parking options, and making their zones bigger. Plus, I now get the opportunity to tell them how my ride/​experience was after each booking.
The service definitely isn’t perfect, but they are trying :)

It was 5:00am, the busses had stopped running, and I needed to get home ASAP. The next bus was in 2 hours and a taxi would have cost me around $ 20. Or I could have walked for an hour.
Car2go saved the day. I found the car, tracked it down, and unlocked it — all off the iPhone. The mobile app is so easy to use and it saves you from carrying the membership card everywhere.
With my account already set up, it was so easy to find a car and drive off. The rates are so reasonable and when you’re done your trip, you can park almost anywhere. Convenience at its finest! MUCH cheaper than a taxi. and who doesn’t like driving a tiny Smart car once in a while?
Car2go is stellar for people who need a quick ride and want to avoid pricy taxis and long commute times on public transit.

Good God. Oh how the mighty have fallen.
What the crap happened car2go? Is it the interweb/​space connection? Is it too many users? Is it that I did something horrible that I am not aware of that requires some sort of karmatic retribution via torture from your service? TELL MEEEEE!
I have become dependent on a service that I can no longer depend on. The car cannot be found, when I am standing in front of it. The entire network is down. My account is not authorized to make reservations at this time. My account is flat out not authorized for some unknown reason that no one can figure out. My reserved car magically disappears of the grid. My reserved car magically changes to another car that does not exist. My trip won’t end. The queue to the call center is an eternity. Aaaaaaaaand so on.
It seems that for every time I use this service successfully, I have at least 2 crappy experiences so frustrating that I want to burn it to the ground. It always happens in the rain. It always happens when it’s the only car in the dt core after a Canucks game. It always happens when I am late for work. Or an appointment. Or life. And the detached don’t give a crap call centre agents in somewhere America do not aid in diffusing the situation.
I get it. You can’t control the interweb. But oh my gosh control something. I politely complain, you give me 20 minutes. I politely complain about two back to back incidents, you give me 30 – 40 minutes. I politely complain about another one and another one and another one and you apologise and give me some more free minutes to use your service. How can I use these free minutes when I can’t even get into a car?
You always ask what you can do to help with the inconvenience this has caused… giving me some money to purchase my own car so I don’t need to rely on an unreliable service would be amazing.

I’ve been lucky so far and haven’t been scammed AFAIK. You can use the mobile app to reserve cars 30 minutes ahead of time. You can also use the mobile app to unlock the car and start your reservation. The car unlock process is very slow, taking usually about a minute. I try to start the unlock process a bit earlier before I get to the car.
The home area expanded to include part of Richmond. The so-​called expansion to the airport is a bit of a misnomer. All they got was some hotel parking and a shuttle that runs relatively infrequently. You would be much better off using Canada Line instead.
One flaw in the pricing is if you get stuck in traffic. Getting charged to sit in traffic can get pretty expensive especially if there’s no alternative route. I try to use it only at nights and weekends along routes that have less traffic.
Also, during certain rush hours in certain places, say after work 5pm on weekdays, it will be nearly impossible to get a car in the downtown area because everyone is trying to get out of downtown.
It’s hard to shake the feeling though that it’s only a matter of time before I get into an accident in one of these things. The handling, acceleration and braking are so uneven and quirky. I can’t even begin to imagine how bad trying to reach the customer service would be after an accident, especially after hours.
car2go is more like an extra option for transportation rather than a service I would depend on. If the weather is nice, I’d more than likely just bike or walk to wherever I need to go, but if it’s raining cats and dogs, and buses aren’t running that often, it’s super convenient when a car2go is nearby.

It was a raining day but the car I got into has a damage so I had to call in to report the damage first… They even charge me the reporting time as the part of my usage… After another 15 on hold and explained what happened, they only gave me 10 min free time that expired in a few weeks… Im trying to avoid car2go now… Too much hassle!