Zipcar, a subsidiary of Avis Rent a Car, is a popular car-sharing service. The cars are dependent on communications with the company's reservation system in order to function. This is fine of course, until the inevitable happens:
On Saturday, customers of car-sharing service Zipcar made a startling discovery. No matter what they did or how hard they tried, they couldn’t get the cars they had reserved to turn on.
The incident, which lasted several hours and affected an unknown number of vehicles and customers, serves as a reminder of the hazards associated with technology that is increasingly reliant on network connectivity to function.
Zipcar manages a fleet of 12,000 cars many of which were rendered inoperative due to an outage experienced by a third party telecommunications vendor. So once a driver turned off the engine (say to get gas, or any other reason)
The doors could open, but the engine and electronic systems wouldn’t respond.
Customers in various states and Canada shared stories of being stranded and waiting on a no doubt overwhelmed customer service to respond.
According to well known IT security wonk Bruce Schneier
This is a reliability issue that turns into a safety issue. Systems that touch the direct physical world like this need better fail-safe defaults.
Reality and Virtual Reality continue their inevitable merger.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 21 2019, @02:32AM
squeegee men everywhere rejoiced.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 21 2019, @04:15AM (1 child)
"According to well known IT security wonk Bruce Schneier:
This is a reliability issue that turns into a safety issue. Systems that touch the direct physical world like this need better fail-safe defaults."
B-b-but it's on the Internet! And it's electronic!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 21 2019, @06:01AM
It's about time that diverse paths becomes a standard instead of an overpriced add-on similar to the way let's encrypt issues certs for no cost.
(Score: 2) by progo on Thursday March 21 2019, @04:23AM
This is weird. Don't ZipCar subscribers have an ID card with RFID, or something like that? Or the car and a user's phone could mutually authenticate offline using QR codes or sound.
Can't the service send all current reservation information to cars AHEAD of time when the reservation is made or changed?
If they built this with reasonable fall-backs in place, then the car has information to work with if the network or back-end service is down.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by progo on Thursday March 21 2019, @04:29AM (4 children)
This must have been a nightmare for the company to clean up. After hours of a network outage, probably MOST of the cars that weren't in their home parking spot would be abandoned by the assigned customers. And those customers might not be willing to go back and drive the car home, later.
It's a car-sized version of abandoned e-scooters.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Spamalope on Thursday March 21 2019, @04:40AM
Not to worry. I'm sure they've got a contract clause making any costs associated with the outage the responsibility of the customer.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by FatPhil on Thursday March 21 2019, @11:37AM
https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/stockdetails/fi-a1p6rw?symbol=US:CAR
Oh, no, wait, that's Avis' share price creeping steadily upwards after the event.
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 21 2019, @04:19PM (1 child)
This kind of problem (or similar) will kill the current speculation on "cars as a service" -- the whole idea that in the future we won't own cars, we'll just summon a self-driving car when needed is going to fail.
As soon as I miss a business meeting and lose $$$$ because I wasn't there to sign the contract, I'm going back to a car that I own and maintain.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 24 2019, @06:34PM
It will be legislated away until you are at the mercy of the corporation, their bought politicians, and the jackbooted thugs who enforce for each.
China is halfway there on the cash. America is halfway there on the cars. They plan to meet in the middle, probably in the ruins of generiatric collapsed Japan.