Stranded after driving out of cellphone range in app-powered smart car

https://www.cbc.ca/radio/asithappens/as-it-happens-wednesday-edition-1.5468449/tech-reporter-stranded-after-driving-out-of-cellphone-range-in-app-powered-smart-car-1.5468741

by pseudolus • 6 years ago

142 121 6 years ago

cbc.ca

WilliamEdward2• 6 years ago

This has to be satire right? How is it even legal to produce a car that only works with an internet connection?

dahfizz• 6 years ago

What law would it be breaking? The "cars have to work all the time" law?

Nasrudith• 6 years ago

Roadworthiness of vehicle definitions - I heard apparently the Autobahn has fines for running out of fuel or breaking down on it without a collision but that is a very different place and legal context.

WilliamEdward2• 6 years ago

I'm trying to say this should be explicitly illegal.

marcosdumay• 6 years ago

It's a rent car, they probably use the internet to order the car to stop working if you exceed the renting time, and we are seeing the anti-circumvention algorithm.

Honestly, I don't know what to think. It is surely a bad thing to prohibit people form having cars that stop working when there is no internet available. I am tempted to say I would sue the company with all my might, but rent-a-car companies often sell to helpless people that have a limited time available on a country and can't spare a fight.

Maybe the best option would be to cancel the credit card expense, get another transportation somewhere else, and if the country laws side with the company too badly, mark it off on the no-visit list.

LadyCailin2• 6 years ago

Unregulated capitalism in the US.

tobltobs• 6 years ago

So we initially had it towed to our AirBnb because we had Wi-Fi there and thought that would be enough to start the car, having our phones securely connected to Wi-Fi.
But it turned out it actually needed to be towed ... to the nearest town with cell service.
I'm a tech reporter. I'm pretty tech savvy.

luma• 6 years ago

All while they were on the phone w/ Gig Car customer support. I'm pretty confused about the sequence of events here.

johnpowell• 6 years ago

I use Mint Mobile here which is a MVNO that uses T-Mobile. I don't get cell reception at my house. But my sister uses AT&T and gets full bars here while my phone is dead. And by dead I mean it doesn't even connect.

So maybe went Gig went cheap when choosing a cell partner.

roywiggins• 6 years ago

Having a good enough signal to make a call is not the same as having good enough signal to push data, and if the car expected to move a megabyte of json over LTE to get started, it would explain the behavior just fine.

bathtub365• 6 years ago

It’s not inconceivable that the car could use a BLE connection with the app to be unlocked and started, at least as a backup when it can’t reach a cell tower.

Having no mitigation at all for the car not reaching the Internet on its cell connection is negligent. Even a hidden screen that lets you put in a one-time use startup code in the case of emergencies would have helped.

ljp_206• 6 years ago

My understanding of the situation is the following:

1. The car must connect to home via cellular to authenticate/receive updates over some regular cadence (days? hours?) 2. Once that is complete, the user can authenticate over phone to the service via any connection (ie airbnb wifi), then unlock the car with bluetooth 3. The situation here occurred after going beyond cell service range for the car. It tried to connect home, failed, and as a result, refused to honor the phone's unlock the car itself had connected to home over cellular

Tepix• 6 years ago

The internet of shit is alive and well.

Live tweet at https://twitter.com/kari_paul/status/1229428892802392064

rl3• 6 years ago

The internet of shit is alive and well.

IoS

It has a nice ring to it. However, I fear for its wider adoption:

https://www.apple.com/legal/intellectual-property/trademark/...

"IOS is a trademark or registered trademark of Cisco in the U.S. and other countries and is used under license."

Uh-oh.

Can see the headline now: Cisco sues budding Internet of Shit (IoS) startup claiming trademark infringement. Plaintiff filings also allege numerous instances of patent infringement, as well as theft of trade secrets.

giancarlostoro• 6 years ago

I never heard of Internetwork Operating System till now.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cisco_IOS

saagarjha• 6 years ago

The term "IOS" is sadly quite overloaded. There's Cisco IOS, and Apple's iOS, and Wii IOS…

tyingq• 6 years ago

"after @GIGCarShare told us to sleep in our car on the side of the road and try again in the morning we called a tow truck..."

Ugh.

dkersten• 6 years ago

I would abandon the car at that point.

Santosh83• 6 years ago

Remarkable how the designers did not conceive that cell coverage doesn't actually cover every inch of the planet or is 100% reliable. What will we have next? A heart-lung machine that depends on 24x7 internet access?

rasikjain• 6 years ago

Looks like a case of great app developed without testing the usecase scenarios.

mettamage• 6 years ago

If I'd be the creator of Black Mirror this would be a fun idea to bounce around in the writers room.

megous• 6 years ago

Make it happen in Death Valley, for increased drama.

justanotherc• 6 years ago

Exactly what I was thinking! This had black mirror written all over it

Tade0• 6 years ago

We already have a ton of apps which assume that everyone has a decent internet connection at all times.

I frequently land in places where my connection is but a trickle(with an absurd ping of 20s at that), and because of that a large part of apps simply refuse to work.

One notable exception is Facebook Messenger - if it doesn't work then you really don't have internet.

ForHackernews• 6 years ago

Facebook Messenger was (is still?) based on the MQTT protocol https://mqtt.org/2011/08/mqtt-used-by-facebook-messenger that is specifically designed to be forgiving of low bandwidth or intermittent connectivity. It's a great example of a company picking the right tool for the job instead of falling victim to not-invented-here syndrome.

BlueTemplar4• 6 years ago

And this is infuriating. I would expect mobile apps to be able to deal better with complete/spotty loss of Internet connection than PC programs, not worse !

NikolaeVarius• 6 years ago

I found that the slack desktop application works WORSE than the browser app in limited connection scenarios.

The browser will attempt to slowly load while the application outright refuses to attempt, and claims it has no connection, even the the browser is loading

frandroid• 6 years ago

I love Twitter this way, which is built "offline first". Twitter will let you read everything in your timeline that you have previously downloaded, let you reply to and like as many tweets as you want, and never complain about lack of connectivity. It'll just dutifully queue your requests and act on them once you're back online. It's one of the only connected apps properly usable on the subway.

smileybarry• 6 years ago

WhatsApp is another one of those, it was designed from the ground up for 2G and terrible signal. Whenever I had absurd ping or a 1-2KB/s connection, WhatsApp would still pull through and function as if my network was perfect (except for media download/upload of course).

nradov2• 6 years ago

30 years ago Lotus Notes offered an application development platform designed to work well with slow or intermittent network connections. It's a shame how far the industry has regressed since then.

blackandblue• 6 years ago

ah come on, don't give anyone ideas :)

btw, testing is very important and i think most companies don't exhaust enough test cases. had google maps gone bonkers in the country especially during very bad weather. i don't think there is a map app out there that takes the weather into account...

BlueTemplar4• 6 years ago

How would weather affect a map ??

simion3142• 6 years ago

They probably used too much YAGNI,TDD,MVP and similar fancy named cool techniques and less good old thinking.

LadyCailin2• 6 years ago

How agile of them!

brazzy2• 6 years ago

I mean in principle TDD could actually prevent this kind of thing because it actually encourages you to think of failure scenarios.

mc32• 6 years ago

Let’s hope they don’t do Ambulances and fireengines.

That would be absolutely frustrating. I have no idea how they can keep the confidence of their customers. It’s such an egregious non-starter.

Robotbeat2• 6 years ago

We’re much closer to 100% cell coverage than you might think... https://lynk.world/ developed a way to connect to totally unmodified phones (using LTE) using LEO satellites. Some very clever scheme for dealing the assumed latency.

kalleboo• 6 years ago

Satellites don't work well when you're 3 stories down in a parking garage

rwmj2• 6 years ago

Or in my case, a bank that assumes I have mobile phone coverage at home. When I try to order anything on the internet these days it wants to send me a 6 digit SMS code, so now I can't order anything on the internet (although Amazon and Paypal still work, touch wood).

dreamcompiler3• 6 years ago

Get a Google Voice account and use that number for SMS. Works great over wifi.

mihaaly2• 6 years ago

In fact California has perhaps more blind spots than live. Ok, it is an overstatement, but we had several days of no cell service on our last roadtrip. We had only cell based navigation because the 'GPS' they suggested at the car rental was just a smartphone, so why not using ours instead. We had quite a bit of a challenge finding room in the night when firefighters took all rooms in a perhaps 100 mi radius in the period of wildfires, we had to rearrange plans in the dark without local knowledge on a remote hilly road leading who knows where and how long with tank getting empty and with no light or people in sight for almost 60 minutes except some shady figures started to follow us after passing them standing in a parking lot discussing something over their car.

Yeah, cell service is not something to rely upon in California!

cptskippy3• 6 years ago

That sounds like incredibly poor planning on your part and a series of bad decisions.

Vacationing in wildfire regions during wildfire season.

You let your fuel tank get low without knowing when or where your next fillup would be.

You didn't have hotel reservations in advance.

You waited until nightfall to find a room.

You're relying on a smartphone for navigation.

You didn't make offline maps of the whole region on everyone's devices. All of California is only around 2gb in Google Maps. That functionality has existied for a decade.

dwild5• 6 years ago

Does everything has to be 100% reliable though? That has a cost and it may be not be worth it to pay that cost. A heart-lung machine does need to be 100% reliable though, which is as a matter of fact, is actually quite expensive, to be 100% reliable.

Piskvorrr2• 6 years ago

Sure, each reliability nine increases the cost 10x. However, this doesn't even look like 90%...

hinkley• 6 years ago

Solar powered. After all, the sun has been shining for billions of years.

closetohome2• 6 years ago

I guarantee on the first day, at the first meeting, someone said "well what happens if they drive a car out of cell range?" and they were immediately shut down.

cousin_it• 6 years ago

Remember the Freeman's Mind joke about guided missiles that fly out of range of the authentication servers?

rahidz2• 6 years ago

@GIGCarShare told us to sleep in our car on the side of the road and try again in the morning

...i...what...but why...that doesn't even make sense?...

Gig told us we used our “allotted restarts” of the car

why is this a thing? if i rent a car from enterprise etc, they don't care how many times i start the car up, it's paid by time...just seems like yet another needless over-complication

also i wonder if these cars have similar issues in parking garages where cell reception is less than ideal.

aikah2• 6 years ago

...i...what...but why...that doesn't even make sense?...

From the article

Basically, a phone unlocks the car using a combination of cell service and Bluetooth. So when you're out of cell range it can be difficult to unlock the car.
They were unable to ping the car because, I don't know, they hadn't updated, or synced, the software in 24 hours.

My understanding is that it works like scooter and bike sharing services, where you have to have an active connection to their servers to use the vehicle. Of course, while it works in the city where there is 3G/4G coverage, it's not going to be efficient in the middle of nowhere where coverage is unlikely... so sometimes convenience (AKA it's just an app) becomes a hindrance. Who's fault is it? (rhetorical question)

akuji1993• 6 years ago

Who's fault is it?

The developer's fault. How this is even debatable is beyond me. Completely failed on the UX level.

rahidz2• 6 years ago

I get that part, but why would sleeping overnight and trying again in 8 hours be a solution?

dwild5• 6 years ago

Who is downvoting this guy and why are you downvoting him? This makes perfect sense. This isn't Reddit where you upvote/downvote based on your opinion, you downvote if the information isn't factual.

reustle• 6 years ago

I've had this issue multiple times with Car2Go inside buildings with little to no service

nradov2• 6 years ago

Multiple times? Why didn't you stop using Car2Go after the first time?

tarunupaday• 6 years ago

“Gig also told me is that they offer RFID card where you kind of scan the card to get into the car. So in the case that you don't have cell service or Bluetooth, you can still get into your car.”

- From the article.

joncrane• 6 years ago

Sounds like an undocumented feature, plus you have to order it and it takes 2 weeks to arrive, so, per the article,

it's a bit at odds with their 'hop in and go' advertising language. So, I think maybe that's why it's not stressed so much on their website.

flyingfences• 6 years ago

"Get into the car" but not start the car?

montenegrohugo• 6 years ago

Had the same experience in Spain. Turned off the car in a location with bad phone signal and the car wouldn't start anymore. Not even creating a wifi Hotspot with the phone (funnily enough our phones did have a weak signal. Ludicrous how a big car can have a weaker antenna than a weight-size-optimised phone).

After hours of talking with support, they finally sent someone to tow us to the nearest city. The car then had reception and finally started again.

pelf• 6 years ago

We live in the future now... and it's horrible.

brazzy2• 6 years ago

Worse, it's stupid.

jacobush• 6 years ago

Yep. All good old dystopic sci-fi of yesteryear was at least evil but cool. This is just sad.

dexen2• 6 years ago

Some comments read to me as if they were trying to say, >I want to benefit from the latest technology >I want to enjoy the bleeding edge tech >bugs? Why are there bugs in the bleeding edge technology? >misfeatures? Why are there misfeatures in the bleeding edge tech?

Some people are okay with occasional tech hiccups as the price of pushing the frontier forward. I hereby thank the brave beta-testers, and hold them above the people who expect perfection the first time out of the gate.

Now if they went for a Death Valley trip in the car that'd have been entirely different story - one of irresponsibility and needless risk taking. But as things were, they suffered only a major inconvenience and no appreciable risk to life and limb, due to maintaining sensible proximity to civilization.

On a lighter note, please consider the histories of Alice Ramsey[1] - first woman to drive cross USA, and Bertha Benz[2] - first woman to drive cross a country, having financed the development of the car. Both encountered malfunctions and other mishaps, solved problems & persevered, and earned fame and appreciation. Both also added to the popularization & development of the technology.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alice_Huyler_Ramsey

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bertha_Benz#First_cross-countr...

devb• 6 years ago

I thought you opened with quotes from the article, but it seems like you made them up? There's no indication that the people here were expecting to go on a pioneering expedition.

dexen2• 6 years ago

You are right, and thank you for pointing it out.

My intent was to satirize the incredulity or even outrage conveyed in certain comments; should've chosen a better format for that.

userbinator2• 6 years ago

encountered malfunctions and other mishaps, solved problems & persevered

The big difference is, cars back then were far simpler, and more importantly could actually be fixed by anyone with a bit of mechanical skill, which wasn't in short supply at the time.

Modern cars are so complex and computerised that even if you own it, you are still mostly powerless to do anything if something goes wrong, and it could even be deliberately designed to thwart repair by anyone other than the original manufacturer.

lm28469• 6 years ago

Last time this story was posted (less than 48 hours ago) someone pointed out that you're supposed to get a nfc card to open/start the car when you're out of town.

Also, there are plenty of old school rental companies that are cheaper and more convenient than these shitty services for these kind of road trips.

gargs• 6 years ago

It's not just bad cellphone service, but sometimes server issues could have the same effect. Hyundai ran a car sharing service here in Amsterdam that used a combination of Bluetooth and cellular connectivity to remotely unlock cars and provision software keys for phones. Every once in a while, though, the app would crash and lose the software key, meaning that the car would end up back again on the map exactly where you picked it up without leaving you with a way to unlock the car. I am not sure what exactly was the issue as the app just errored out.

I'd have to call the customer service line, where they wouldn't know what to do as the car was already in use according to the backend. After a few times getting stuck, I came up with a solution which was to literally beg them to cancel the checkout so that the car was available again. They were trained to not do that as their information was that a car could not be left parked outside their service area, which was definitely not the case as I was able to start a new reservation and unlock the car. This happened quite a few times, so much so that I would already know the solution but had to spend an awful amount of time explaining it to the reps -- starting with uninstalling and reinstalling the app as told by them.

Then, some other company took over the system and started a new system with the same infrastructure and the app codebase. When it happened again a couple times, I was finally able to get hold of a systems programmer who debugged the issue with me while I was out in the wind. It hasn't recurred since.

Just wanted to share this story

raverbashing• 6 years ago

Well, but that is not an issue of cell phone connectivity, it's just the app being crappy.

Sounds like the new management is less clueless than the previous one, if no one had heard about the problem (and if the cars were - they should be - gps-tracked then the backend should just use that as a position, obviously).

oefrha• 6 years ago

I would already know the solution but had to spend an awful amount of time explaining it to the reps -- starting with uninstalling and reinstalling the app as told by them.

Really need Shibboleet for tech support.

https://xkcd.com/806/

BlueTemplar4• 6 years ago

Wow, this is DRM taken to a whole new level!

userbinator2• 6 years ago

Technically speaking if you rent a car you don't actually own it, so I don't think this goes in the same category as other DRM-fails.

stonewareslord• 6 years ago

DRM doesn't have to require ownership. See Amazon's ebooks or Netflix. Not owned, but still under DRM.

techbubble• 6 years ago

I'm just surprised they have to tow the vehicle. A better design would be to have a hardwired or bluetooth number pad in the car. The app can generate emergency start codes 2-3 times which can be entered in the number pad. Lots of ways to prevent abuse including working only when there isn't a signal present.

fangorn• 6 years ago

Next in Internet of Shit: "smart" car ransomware. Coupled with autopilot, because why not.

wiether• 6 years ago

Gilfoyle did it to Dinesh !

jacquesm• 6 years ago

Any in vehicle device that has the power to control whether the car starts or not should have a fail safe mode that ensures that it will never be less safe than the vehicle without the addition. Telling users to 'overnight in their car' could be very unsafe depending on the conditions. This company deserves to go out of business rapidly.

jaclaz3• 6 years ago

I would like to compare with a "normal" rent:

1) you are given (by a human) the keys of the car in exchange of providing your driver license and credit card

2) you do (within limits) whatever you want with the car

3) after the agreed upon rent period you bring back the car and keys (giving them to a human) and then the rental company checks how many miles you did (and if you exceeded the included amount you are charged, unless you got an all inclusive/unlimited mmileage contract)

I.e. the renting company actually "trusts" you (backed financially by your credit card).

And this formula worked seemigly just fine for the last 60 years or more.

A "natural" evolution would IMHO be:

1) you get pre-approved (i.e. you provide your driving license and credit card before and outside the actual rent) when you start the rent your smartphone is somehow allowed to open and start the car

2) you do (within limits) whatever you want with the car

3) after the agreed upon rent period you bring back the car in a designed area, you notify the renter of it and somehow your smartphone cannot open or start the car anymore (and at that time the mileage is checked remotely, etc.)

If this was the case the need for coverage would only be needed in the designed pick and leave area.

I fail to see any practical advantage for the renting company to collect data "realtime" (and thus need the anytime coverage).

I.e. it seems to me more like a "because I can" reason than anything else.

dariusj18• 6 years ago

Seems to me that it is probably some inadvised anti-theft thing.

jaclaz3• 6 years ago

Yep, but is it theft an actual "real world" problem?

How has (say) Herz, Avis or Budget managed to survive all these years (and still do)?

Surely rental car theft must be something rare enough to not be of concern (statistically).

Besides, a car is not something designed (by the manufacturer) to be easily accessible, and if professional car thieves are going to target a vehicle, allow me to doubt that the whatever the smart peeps at GigCarShare devised is more effective than the manufacturer's and or additional third party [1] anti-theft devices.

BTW, should the whatever device/system actually be much better than competing systems, they would most probably have much more imcome/profit by selling the devices/systems instead of renting cars.

[1] possibly specialized since a couple decades or more in the anti-theft technology

werbel• 6 years ago

This is exactly how it works for a Polish minute car rental service Traficar.

You can even drive through the whole country to another Traficar service zone, leave the car there and get back by train.

neoromantique• 6 years ago

Same here in Baltic's, you can take a car in Vilnius, Lithuania, and drive through Latvia and into Estonia and leave the car in Tallinn.

Nextgrid• 6 years ago

It’s less about collecting data (not saying they don’t do it, but data collection failing shouldn’t prevent the car from starting) and more about not having the skill to make a offline authentication system and a way for the phone to talk to the car via Bluetooth without relying on the internet.

Who wants to bet all their engineering talent was instead spent on playing with big toys like Kubernetes and chasing the latest JS framework?

moftz• 6 years ago

Make it a keypad to unlock the door and have a key inside to start the car. Rental company texts or emails you the code that will either work immediately or at a certain time in the future. This would require you to have internet or cell service at some point prior to the rental (not unreasonable). The code would be good for the entire time you have the rental in case you lock the key in the car. The car would only need internet at the beginning of the rental to get the new door code and the expiration date of the rental and could run unencumbered from then on. You could take this one step further and have the code be what starts the car too.

uxp100• 6 years ago

ZipCar seems to have gottwn this right, probably because it was developed years ago. You have a card, and it works for your car even without cell service afaik.

Unfortunately zipcar is declining where I live so I canceled my membership. They removed the zip cars in my neighborhood and I see zip cars around less often in general.

analog31• 6 years ago

I cringe when a "pure software" business gets into an area where health and safety are potentially at play. This kind of stuff is going to only get worse. Hi, we're from a startup, and we're here to burn your house down.

I think that something like "engineering fundamentals" should be a course requirement for computer science majors in case they aren't headed for careers in CS research. Back in my day, at the start of the first day of physics class, the professor showed a video of the famous footage from the Tacoma Narrows Bridge disaster. Then we got down to business.

ficklepickle2• 6 years ago

Based on the stack, I'd wager that the vendor (vulog) is not an engineering-driven organization.

hypewatch• 6 years ago

So the company that did this - Gig Car - can remotely shut off a vehicle in their fleet? How is this legal?

It’s sounds so dangerous! What if they lost internet on a bridge? People could really get hurt.

machello13• 6 years ago

It's unclear but the article mentions they went for a hike and when they came back, the car wouldn't start. I don't think they can shut down the car while it's running.

dwild5• 6 years ago

It’s sounds so dangerous! What if they lost internet on a bridge? People could really get hurt.

There's actually system to do this, and I'm also amazed that this is legal. In this case though it's not that, it's simply that to unlock the car it go through a data connection. It won't shut itself, you just won't be able to unlock it without a data connection.

ficklepickle2• 6 years ago

Based on the cars and how it is described, it sounds like the same system as Evo[0] in Vancouver. It is run by our automobile association, BCAA. Their platform vendor is called Vulog[1].

The big difference with Evo is it sounds like these don't have the keys in the glovebox. The app is hot garbage, so it comes in handy. Also the RFID cards are standard issue here. I have taken them well out of service for over 24 hours without issue. All this to say, I don't believe it is an inherent limit of the platform. That said, my experience poking around exposed endpoints does not inspire confidence. The back end is some Microsoft abomination. I'd love to know what runs on the in-car embedded device, but it's probably WinCE. Anybody here worked for vulog?

The article seems to imply they are smart cars, but the picture is clearly of a Prius C. I guess they mean smart as in internet-connected rather than the brand from Mercedes.

[0] https://evo.ca [1] https://www.vulog.com/en/

Stranded after driving out of cellphone range in app-powered smart car

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