Things That Make My Day

Lately - Zipcar!

And by "lately", I really mean "for the past year or so". Zipcar is the best. They really, really are.

To back up a little - about a year ago, I sold my car. Cars are such a hassle. Insurance is expensive, they constantly need maintenance, gas is a killer. They are the complete opposite of an investment. It probably cost me something like an average of $800-$1000 a month to keep my car around. It was insane, especially since we hardly used it.

Now, for years, I had been seeing and hearing about the Cambridge, MA-based Zipcar company. It's car-sharing. They park cars all over the city, and you can rent them out for a fee by the hour or by the day. What's especially nice is that they have two of them parked right in our apartment building's parking lot, as well as three more a two-minute walk away, and they are also all over Boston so in a pinch we could take the T into the city and get one from there.

Zipcar as a service is great. All the reservation-making is done online, they respond to all service requests promptly, and the hourly or daily fee you pay includes insurance and gas. In our area, they go for about $9-11 per hour and $60-$80 per day. Not bad, really.

The cars themselves are pretty sweet, too. They usually vary the models in each location so that you have a choice. We've had a Mazda 3, a Mini Cooper, a Kia Soul and (just recently) a Nissan Altima Hybrid. They keep them very clean, perform regular maintenance on them, and swap them out pretty regularly for new cars.

We make reservations every weekend to do routine errands, sometimes during the week to go out to dinner, and occasionally we take one for two or three days up to Maine or NH. In all the time, out of all the reservations, we've never encountered a mechanical issue and there was one single, solitary time where the person who had the car before us returned it a little late. I'd say, for a car sharing service, that's pretty good. All of our gripes have been very minor.

Their customer service tends to be impeccable, too. They are courteous on the phone, respond to emails quickly, and seem to go out of their way to help. That time the person returned the car late? We noticed the other car in our lot wasn't reserved, so we called them up real quick and they changed the reservation over to the free car so that we didn't lose any time waiting. One time, we returned our Zipcar to the wrong location at the end of a reservation. The next day, they called me asking me what had happened, as there were some people looking for the (missing) car. We apologized profusely and returned the car to the correct place and, despite being very well within their right to do so, Zipcar didn't fine us or yell at us or anything.

A couple of weekends ago, we had a mix-up with the iPod adaptor in the car we regularly reserve. The one in the car has been broken for a while, so we went to buy a new one for it, since Zicar will reimburse you for small purchases for cars. To our immense disappointment, someone stole the adaptor we bought. When Zipcar received the reimbursement request and contacted us with a question about it, we told them they shouldn't bother reimbursing it because the adaptor was stolen. Zipcar did quite the opposite - they reimbursed our purchase, put in a maintenance request to replace the broken one in the car, and said they would send us one of our own to keep in case we needed it! Seriously? That's ridiculously good customer service. Ben's word for it was "excessive", which may or may not be true, but it definitely makes us remember how awesome Zipcar is.

They've just recently gone public on the stock market (at a very high price, which is great) to raise capital. I can only hope their excellent standards do not go down in the future, because at this rate I will use them for forever.