As the internet and the businesses that use them become more and more inhospitable, James Fisher praises the car club, for being that increasingly rare thing — a good invention that works well.
There was a tweet going around last week that asked people to share their most millennial complaints. It was interesting for a few reasons. One of those was the creeping realisation that I am now at the age (32) where I can remember ‘how things were’ and complain about them, which was jarring. Another thread cut on the very thin tether that ties me to my youth.
The other interesting thing was that everyone was complaining about how the internet used to be better, and has been ruined by people who live in California.
‘Remember when you could just check out as a guest’, howled one comment, while another bemoaned QR codes and AI search results and the endless scraping of personal information required to do just about anything. These people are right. The internet is much worse now than it used to be. It’s harder to use, full of lies and poison, and no longer serves its primary purpose, which was to be a free resource containing most, if not all, of the world’s information. And to buy things you don’t need.
These things happen. They happen when there is money to be made. Technology is ultimately a business and businesses will do what they must, and those decisions are not always in the interests of their users. This is the way it is, and the way it will be.
Tech and disruption has been ever-present in my entire life and they are not optional. While it can be more fun to focus on the many things that are bad, instead I am going to write about one thing I use a lot that is actually very good. And because this is in theory a car column, it is car related. It is the car club.
I use Zipcar, but there are others. I have used Zipcar for the best part of 10 years, and I have never had a bad experience with it. It does precisely what it says it will do. It doesn’t send me emails I do not want. It is immensely useful.
I live in London, which is a big city with lots of cars. If you ask me, it has too many cars. My partner and I used to own a car, but as most Londoners (at least those living relatively central) will tell you, driving in the city is a miserable experience. It is also not a particularly efficient way of getting around, because the traffic is very bad, because of all the other cars. I would use the car to go to cricket games in the summer and sometimes to go to the big Tesco on the Old Kent Road, because that’s the only place that sells the yoghurt I like and I would inevitably buy lots of other things while I was there that I would be too lazy to carry home.
But we never used it enough. The battery would die, and need to be replaced. It costs £150 a year just to park it. So it was sold, because it was expensive and we didn’t need it.
But sometimes you do need a car. Taking all your rubbish to the tip on public transport would be a strange thing to do, and arguably quite antisocial. Big shops at the big Tesco. Generally moving things around. I occasionally need a car for an hour about once or twice a month. Zipcar lets me borrow a car for an hour about once or twice a month and for a very reasonable price.
I moved into the house I currently live in using a Zipvan. Whether or not it should be legal for random people to drive two-ton vans around with little experience or supervision is a conversation for another time, but it meant that I could move from old home to new home in one trip. I once moved house in a BMW 4 series, and that took most of the day, and most of that day was spent driving back and forth, because the boot of a BMW 4 series is very small.
If there is one piece of advice in this column that isn’t ‘join a car club’, it is ‘do not move house in a BMW 4 series’. Consumer journalism at its finest.
Of course I have a certain amount of privilege. I don’t have kids who need to be taken places. I live in an area with good buses and can walk to a tube station in 20 minutes. My work does not require me to have a car, and when my work does require me to have a car, the work is usually driving that car around, which I do not do in London — although you can do the big shop at big Tesco in a McLaren, if you’re interested. See above RE consumer journalism.
I have lots of millennial complaints. I don’t understand why YouTube is as popular as it is. I am annoyed by how expensive everything is. I dislike QR codes, and data scraping, and how everything lives on a cloud now. I am upset how social media, which was once a fun way to talk to your friends, is now a pool of AI slop that is slowly turning the brains of the world smooth. So I am eternally grateful for Zipcar, because it works like it should, and has not tried to become something it is not. A lot of modern tech inventions are bad, but this one is good.
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