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ChineseZipcar Zips Into Los Angeles
Last Halloween the king of Los Angeles car-sharing and friend to many a MetroRider, Flexcar, announced that it would be merging with Boston based rival Zipcar, combining their powers like The Planeteers to form the Captain Planet* of car-sharing companies. Well, a little over two months later, Zipcar has arrived in L.A.
I received my stylish Zipcard in the mail today and activated my account which nabbed me $25 worth of free driving credit just for being an old Flexcar member. I’m eager to use up that credit as soon as possible, having been a Flexcar member for over a year the curiousity to see what’s new is overwhelming. Overall, I was very pleased with Flexcar, the system wasn’t flawless but the customer service was good and when the system worked (and it did the majority of the time) it was a breeze.
One difference is apparent without even having to take out a car: Zipcar is more expensive. Since I rarely have a need for a car, I was on Flexcar’s most basic personal plan, the “Standard Plan”, which cost $35 per year and had no monthly fee. I just paid the hourly rate (typically $5 - $10) whenever I needed a car. Zipcar has a similar plan, called the “Occasional Driving Plan”, but the yearly rate is $50 and the hourly rates start at $9. Still a relatively bargain - if I take a car out four hours a month and add in amortize the yearly rate it comes out to forty bucks a month - but Flexcar was a real value. One nice thing about Flexcar was, for whatever reason, sometimes cars were availabe at bargain basement prices, say $5 or $6 and hour, and if you were willing to walk or ride the bus a bit you could get to one of these bargain cars and save a nice chunk of change. Not sure if Zipcar will have this, but it would be nice.
The changeover is not yet complete, Flexcar says that by the end of January all Flexcars will be Zipcars and customers will make reservations at the Zipcar site and use their Zipcards to gain access to vehicles. As it stands now, the Zipcar site offers no results when searching for cars in the Downtown area. Flexcar’s site gives back a nice long list (with some bargain prices!) but with new Zipcar branding. Flexcar members who make reservations in January are told to bring both their Flexcar Smart Card and their newly activated Zipcard to their reservation.
Since Zipcar isn’t offering up any cars in the area, I can’t review the online reservation system, but cursory impressions are positive. Flexcar’s site wasn’t bad, but had the fatal flaw of not supporting all browsers, namely my mobile browser (Opera Mini) and the Camino browser (no relation). This could be a real hassle when I was away from my computer and wanted to make a reservation, since Flexcar’s automated phone reservation system left a lot to be desired. Zipcar seems to handle all browsers, and the interface seems intuitive, with a Google Maps listing of nearby cars. Hopefully the fact that I can access the browser from my mobile phone will make phone reservations unnecessary, but I’m still eager to test it out to see how it compares to Flexcar’s terribly unintuitive phone system. Hopefully it’s easier, because according to the Zipcar agreement, if you end up having a customer service person place your reservation, there is a $3.50 service charge.
Look for further coverage of the Flexcar to Zipcar transition as the month goes on. I thought Flexcar was a great program, and highly recommended it as an essential aspect of the Transit Oriented Lifestyle, we’ll see if Zipcar can earn my seal of approval.
Previously:
- Flexcar and Zipcar Merge to Become One - 10/31/07
*Why is it that Captain Planet never got a Nobel Prize? He was warning people about the dangers of global warming long before “An Inconvenient Truth”.
Discussion
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I just moved here from Boston with three years of Zipcar experience under my belt. Here’s what I can tell you:
1. The Web site is quite nice. I find the interface a little clunky and stupid at times, but it is far and away the user-friendliest aspect of Zipcar.
2. The phone system is byzantine, but you can burn through the menus pretty quickly once you know the prompts. It starts by offering cars in your neighborhood (proximate to your home or work address as set in your preferences) and expands outward, but you can also tell it to search other neighborhoods in alphabetical order. This can be a bit cumbersome and makes for some really long phone calls, but if you have tons of patience, you can get it done.
3. In the event of a car issue, the telephone support is excellent, and they offer driving credits without hesitation if something goes awry. However, they do not offer actual refunds back to your credit card under virtually any circumstances.
4. Do not ever, ever, ever be late. It’s $50 without mercy every time, even if you’re only 6 minutes late and nobody else has the car booked and it’s 3 in the morning.
5. Related to which, they are indeed expensive - a full day’s rental goes for around $67.50 and the hourly rates can be up to $12 for sportier cars (e.g., convertibles). They used to have discounts on certain “branded” hourly cars (e.g., Honda Elements plastered with IKEA logos) but they seem to have discontinued this offer.
I’m sure some of this overlaps with Flexcar, but those are the most notable “FYIs” I can think of offhand.
indeed the first thing i noticed was the “if you’re late it costs you $50″ in the pretty brochure with my new card. flexcar was really understanding about being late with returning the car so long as it wasn’t reserved after you and there were no penalties at all. kind of lame that there are now, especially that expensive. seems a tad overkill but then again, they’ve been around in chicago and boston and elsewhere and maybe that’s an issue that was an ongoing problem, which is understandable.
aside from that, the increase in yearly fee seems okay since a flat annual fee should be the same across all areas, but the increase in car prices makes no sense. i think the car prices should be relative to their location, i.e. it would be cheaper in Gainesville, florida than LA to have a car because of insurance, gas, and operating costs but to think its at least $4 or more an hour since october for even the cheapest car seems a stretch.
however, i’ve not been able to give the zipcars a spin yet so maybe those new logos on the doors do look that much cooler.
Over here in Santa Monica, Flexcar rentals have $10 an hour for quite a while — $9 would be a bargain!! Damn my rich neighbors for jacking up the prices!
if a full days rental goes for 67.50 why not just rent a car for $35 a day? i’m not familiar with flexcar at all, but is the benefit over a rental car service in that you can rent by the hour? but if you rent for a large chunk of time, wouldn’t it be better renting a daily car rental at Hertz?
The Flexcar/Zipcar rates include gas (up to 150/180 miles per day) and good insurance for the base rate. Especially if you don’t have a car (and therefore no insurance), the included insurance can make up the cost difference itself, and not having to pay for gas can add up too.
Plus I believe the tax rate is lower than the normal car rental companies.
As a current member of Flexcar in the LA area, I was pretty disappointed to learn that I couldn’t use the Flexcar website to reserve a car this weekend, and that I haven’t recieved my new Zip Card. Apparently, while they are merging, we customers are shit out of luck? I got the email on friday about the merger and by saturday the Flexcar website was defunct, but yet I couldn’t log into the Zipcar website either because I don’t have their new card!! I still don’t have their new card and its tuesday. I had several important errands that I needed a car for and right now, I can’t do anything. I called Zipcar and they offered no solution, just really? Yeah, sorry about that, don’t know.!!
Infuriating!! This merger is being handled very poorly. I had great success using Flexcar and found their cars affordable and available for the most part, wasn’t a problem to reserve one. Now, even once I get my card, if I get my card, I notice that the car is NEVER there. I don’t know what is going on but so far, this merger stinks and I have nothing good to say about Zipcar.
WRT to hourly vs daily, I’ve used both Flexcar and regular rental cars, and regular rental cars were only cheaper for people who have have a car and insurance coverage. The Flexcar daily rates of about $70 were essentially the same rate you pay when you need full collision & liability coverage on the regular $35 daily rental. And that didn’t cover any fuel for the regular rental.
WRT to Zip vs. Flex, I’m not sure I’ll keep relying upon it based upon how this changeover is being handled. I still don’t know if I’ll be getting the same pricing plan I had, even though when they announced the merger it was announced that we would keep our current pricing plans. I asked twice when the merger was announced and got no response. And I can’t reserve a car on either site right now.
I also think that, with the (likely) higher hourly rates than I’ve been paying, it’ll probably only take one or two $50 penalties caused by being 5 minutes over my reservation due to being stuck in traffic before I decide it’s no longer worth it to go carless. But they do say that you can avoid getting hit with one by extending an in-progress reservation as long as you call and extend the reservation before the reservation’s up.
can they guarantee that i can get a car right away, without making a reservation?
One cool feature which I liked (and didn’t set up until later on in my Ziplife) is their text-message notification system, which texts your cell 30 minutes before the end of your reservation to let you know whether (a) it’s available for extension, or (b) you’d better get your @$$ back to the parking spot.
As others have pointed out, Hertz doesn’t include insurance, gas, or taxes in that tidy $35/day rate. Plus, you usually have to go to an airport or somesuch to get really good deals on car rentals from Hotwire and the like - which in L.A. can take another two hours from your day. So you’re partially paying for convenience (the Zipcar is two blocks from your house) and for simplicity (one bill, flat rate, no extra charges unless you go over the daily mileage limit). That said, they aren’t great for multi-day trips or for travelling huge distances (say, to San Francisco) - the cost-effectiveness drops considerably in such cases.
In Boston, they’ve stopped branding the new cars with the Green Z logo - now they just say Zipcar on the trunk in a tasteful font. It’s a bit more subtle.
I’m sorry to hear they’ve muddled the Flexcar merger so badly. I was hoping they’d get their act together by February 1 so I could start Craigslisting for furniture with my Zipcard!
Forgot to address this.
I’ve gotten up too late on plenty of Saturday mornings having forgotten to book my Zipcar the day before. I am usually way outta luck by this point. Plan in advance as much as possible, especially around weekends. In Boston, I either ended up missing out entirely, having to walk or bike eight miles to a remote Zipcar, or else getting stuck with a car that nobody else wanted for very good reason (electric car with byzantine charging system and mandatory operations test beforehand, anyone?). During the week, you’re bound to have better luck, but I would never call it a sure thing that “emergency” vehicles are available.
if they have the same number of cars/ customers here as flexcar did, it should be pretty easy to reserve a car a few minutes before you need one. downtown had around 40 or 50 cars. i’ve got my fingers crossed.
Yah, the only way I see it being a problem reserving a car is if all of a sudden the membership numbers in socal increased a huge amount with the merger. If not then I’m sure last minute reservations, which is how I’ve got every car in the last year, will still be viable. Tho I agree with myke, it def doesn’t hurt to book it as early as u can.
I have never seen anything for $5, and if I did I would definitely go for it because when I go somewhere, I’m usually gone for a few hours and $10 per hour is hefty.
Apparently there are no cars available in L.A. at all right now. Just called to find out when cars would be available again. Was told probably next week sometime at the earliest.
I can understand fewer cars because some have been taken off-line in staggered fashion for conversion, but all of them at once for two weeks?
WTF?!?!
They’re not exactly winning me over as a new customer.
Did anyone notice Zipcar’s new rate in Philadelphia is $7.25/hour? Why is it $9 here but only $7.25 there? Surely Philly (big like NYC) has got to be even more expensive than Socal for a car. I think the difference is that over there Zipcar has competition. Here they don’t. So here, Zipcar takes out Flexcar and nearly DOUBLES our rates from $5 to $9, just because it can. It’s like a big “up yours LA.” Not exactly the way to win our favor. I am so not liking this. I feel like quitting just to protest the inequity.
I agree this merger is being very poorly managed. Early instructions sounded like we would receive a Zipcard, and within a day or two we could cruise along with the new system. Instead it looks like it will be two weeks without any cars online in the whole city.
I imagine a lot of Flexcar users (like myself) made the decision to go car-less on the assumption that we would have at least weekly access to a vehicle. As it stands now, I can’t even make commitments for next week because it’s unclear when the cars will be ready.
as a former flexcar member, i have to agree with those who say the merger is being poorly handled. i received no notification that all 6(!) cars were being removed from my neighborhood due to supposed lack of demand (not just reconfiguration) until logging onto the site to reserve a car the 1 week of January, when an “alert” appeared — and I was unable to reserve anything. when i moved to my neighborhood there was one car. in 1.5 years, flexcar added 5, presumably because in this high-density, bustling area there was demand for it. i know i had to be on my toes about RSVPing in advance for both weekdays and weekends, even with 6 cars. so who is the genius who decided not to leave even one car in this neighborhood? my reservation in another neighborhood for next week (a business related trip) was canceled by zipcar, who left me a message saying i would need to RSVP again when I received my zipcard. then when i received what should have been my zipcard in the mail this week, there was no card in the envelope! after calling to straighten that out, the zipcard rep could not tell me where ANY of the LA cars would be located when they finished reconfiguring the vehicles. i am ready to go buy a car and have done with it.
Update: cars now listed as available in the UCLA area (nowhere near me, but available at least). But that’s not the news I was happiest to get when I logged on. Apparently they kept their word and my rates haven’t changed, because the cars are available at the rate I was getting, which I feared was not the case.
I’m not won over yet, but it’s definitely a positive sign that I, and anyone else with my pricing plan, should be happy to hear.
In Philly, flex/zip is moving in to an area dominated by one of the most successful non-profit car sharing model in the world, PhillyCarShare. In LA zip run the game.
All the USC cars are now online and the prices have definitely gone up. The Scion xB that was an amazing $5/hour under Flexcar is now $9/hour under Zipcar. The Mini Cooper Convertible and utility vehicle that used to live on campus are also gone. Definitely not a happy way to start, and I think the company may be pricing themselves out students’ reach.
However, if you browse over to the vehicles based at Pomona College in Claremont, all their vehicles (even a Honda Odyssey) are $7/hour! I still haven’t figured out how campus partnerships figure into Zipcar pricing, but it would seem to me that Claremont users are likely to drive more miles per use because most intown or coastal destinations are even further away! Why do they get a cheaper rate?
The following comment from BECKY was lost in the transition to the new domain.
It’s official:
Car sharing is an evolving category of transportation, and we are working hard to pioneer the industry. We are constantly learning more about the best way to operate our service, and sometimes what we learn results in a tough decision.
In Southern California, we have decided to remove our vehicles from areas outside of the universities we serve (cars will remain at UCLA, USC, Pomona, UCSB, UCSD and UCI).
This was a difficult decision for us, and we understand it may present significant inconvenience for you. We apologize for that.
Reservations for all affected locations have been canceled and fully credited. Further, we have refunded annual membership fees for all members who paid an annual fee within the past nine months. Your refund will appear in your account automatically. If you have questions about your refund, please contact us at info@zipcar.com.
The following comment from NED was lost in the transition to the new domain.
If I’m reading Becky’s comments correctly it seems that Zipcar is pulling out of *ALL* Los Angeles locations aside from a handful of colleges and universities. I hope they make this announcement in a more obvious way than at the bottom of a post now on page two of this blog.
As private companies, Flexcar and Zipcar have always been quiet about the exact economics of their business models. I would speculate that Los Angeles proved to be a less than ideal city for car sharing. While Flexcar had hundreds of users in Southern California, it definitely was not enjoying the popularity of other cities like New York, where members have to reserve vehicles weeks in advances just to get out on a Saturday.
The following comment from BECKY was lost in the transition to the new domain.
I got an email this morning with the announcement. The reason I got the announcement is because I activated my zipcar card. Not sure if they plan to make it public knowledge on their site. I sent them an email back telling them how much they suck.
The following comment from REBECCA was lost in the transition to the new domain.
i received the same message this morning. zipcar totally sucks. i thought merger meant bringing two companies together, not one company totally squashing another. and it’s stupid business planning. students don’t have the flexible disposable income that the employed law firm types do in downtown. hopefully someone at zipcar will get the message that they need to bring back at least some of the cars downtown. grrr…
The following comment from MATTHEW was lost in the transition to the new domain.
That really seems like a short-sighted mistake to me. As traffic gets worse, and transit becomes more available and more popular (especially rail transit), I would imagine demand will only grow, and car sharing provides a alternative to needing a car in a city like Los Angeles. I have been debating going car free next time I move, but this would definitely put a kink in my plans, and will create a lot of ill will towards ZipCar (not to mention they would probably lose all potential continued use of students after they graduate).
[...] Venice, and Wilshire Center had access to a large number of vehicles. However, 2008 brought the anticipated/dreaded merger with rival Zipcar, and as CurbedLA reports, the outcome of the merger is a worst-case-scenario come [...]
The only reason cars are left at colleges and unis is that they are contractually obligated to leave cars there — in fact, many provide a revenue guarantee so they can not lose money. It does suck, however, that they pulled out with little or no warning…corporate bigwigs at it again.
I can’t believe Zipcar can’t make money by leaving cars at least at other universities — like Occidental, Loyola, etc. — as well as at metro stations. Heck, MTA, Metrolink, Amtrak should give then a free space and help them advertise … it would be a convergence for transit and Zipcar to work together … this move out of LA is not forward thinking …
… guess I am going to have to buy a car now…. thanks Zipcar…..
[...] this holiday weekend, I had only taken out a Zipcar once since Flexcar became Zipcar and made a big poopy mess out of the whole L.A. car sharing scene. Due to the top secret political [...]