Evan Carmichael reactivates his Zipcar membership and walks through the whole process: getting the Zipcard, unlocking a minivan, checking fuel, and driving to pick up his 4-year-old son. The car stayed accessible, the steps were intuitive, and the minivan worked well for his family.
Chapters
Hey, it's Evan, and today I don't have my usual set of wheels, so I thought I would test out using a Zipcar, which I've never tried before. I had a membership for a couple months but haven't used it, so I signed up for the one near my office, and I have to go pick up my son. Of all the Zipcars available, the only one the website says is free is this minivan. So I am stuck with a minivan. I brought my car seat with me to pick up my son. He's 4. And the first thing I'm supposed to do is look over the car and see if there's anything wrong with it. Any damages or scratches. They sent me this email, what I'm supposed to do on my check-in, but I kind of forgot what that was since it was a couple months ago. So I thought I'd just try it out and see how intuitive it is, and, uh, we'll see what happens. So everybody gets a card. So this is my Zipcard here. My name isn't on it, but I have an ID there at the bottom. And what you're supposed to do is on the front there is a little Zipcard thing here. You put the card on and that's supposed to unlock it. I didn't hear anything, but let's see if it unlocked. It worked! Haha! Okay, so I'm gonna— oh, it only unlocked the front door. So let's go in, unlock everything. I'll take the car seat and pop it in, and we'll loose fasten it when I get there. Close that up, get in. Now I'm inside. Very exciting. It is hot in here. And apparently, I think the keys are supposed to be in the dash here. So let's pull this up and see. Uh, keys are not in the dash. This is for gas, so you can put the receipts if you need to buy gas. If you're— if it's under a quarter tank, you're supposed to buy gas. So where are the keys? Ah, I see something down here. Let's take off my sunglasses. I can see better. So it looks like they're— oh, it's, uh, oh, that's cool. It's this little string here so the keys won't go away and you can't take them with you. So I guess the unlock lock always happens with the, uh, with the card because I can't take that off. Okay, let's try it up. Put the keys in. It starts. I hope I have more than a quarter tank of gas because that would be— whoa, holy cow! Okay, let's turn this down. Wow. All right, way to start the day with a headache there. Okay, so I've got I've got half a tank of gas, so I should be good for the day. I am using it for 2.5 hours. I've booked it. This was the only one available. I'm going to crank up the air conditioning here because it's hot. Max AC. We're good. All right, I'm going to drive off. I'm going to go pick up my son and, uh, we'll report back soon. I just arrived at my son's school. I turned off the car and I'm hoping that if I take out the keys, I can still get back in the car. I'm thinking my card unlocks it, but I don't have that far to go. Just in case, I'm just gonna pull them out and maybe leave the door open just in case here. Hopefully it doesn't auto-lock on me. Let's get out. Let's go find my son. Make sure the car seat's still good. Yeah, I'll have to fix that when we get here, but let's go get him, see what he thinks about the car. There he is. Hi. Come on in. Can you open it? We have a new car today. You want to see it? What's in your hand? This is the car. What's in my hand? This is— look, look, look, look. This says Zipcar. Oh, you don't care now, huh? You just want to see the car. This is the car. What do you think? Is it good? It's pretty big, huh? No, your side is on the other side. OK, that can be your side. Let's get in, get in, get in. See your car seat? In here. You know how to get in here. Okay, I'm gonna put you in the car seat. We're gonna go. And for those of you watching— you like it? Yeah, we'll fix it. We'll move it. You want to move it to this side? Okay, can you move it by yourself? Whoa! Whoa! Can you help me? Yeah, okay, I'm gonna help you. We're gonna go home, okay? Okay. So I got back in the car. Everything did not lock on me. I have my keys. I can put them back in. We could start up again. My son is sitting in his chair. Do you want to say anything? Yes. What do you want to say? Love you. Love you. We love you too. High five. Oh, oh, there you go. Okay, we're going to start up and away we go home. All right, I'll report back when I'm dropping off the car. Okay, we just arrived home. I'm going to turn off the car. I spent about— we were gone for like 2 and a half hours. I'm going to take it to the shop soon first. But Hayden, what do you think? Did you like the car? Samam. What? Samam. Did you like the car? Yeah. Yeah? Should we do it again? Yeah, you're making jumbled words. Okay, let's get out. Let's get out. Let's get out. We have arrived. Okay, here we go. Let's get out. Here's the house, everybody. This is my place. Nice sunny day. Let's get the man out of the car. Oh, you found your own way out? Okay, you want to wave bye to the camera? Blow a kiss? Blow a kiss? All right, we'll see you soon. Can you close it by yourself? And good job. All right, we'll see you soon.
