My wife and I are both Zipcar members, but we joined separately. If she makes a reservation with her account, her zipcard will unlock the car, but mine won't. I can see why it would be desirable for the Zipcar to be restricted to the person who reserved it -- you don't want any Zipcar member to have access to the car while it's in your possession. But I'm surprised that it works this way because it would seem like a huge technical challenge to implement such a system. How does it work? Does Zipcar, for example, place a cell-phone call to the car to inform some on-board computer of the Zipcard number it should respect during a time period?

-- Anonymous, June 09, 2004

Answers

Yep. That's exactly how it works.

-- Anonymous, June 11, 2004

Dear Charles, It would be convenient for you and your wife to convert your 2 memberships into a single, two driver membership. Not only this cost less in annual dues, but it allows you to reserve each other cars, and since it would be a dual membership, you could still rent 2 cars at the same time when you need to.

-- Anonymous, June 15, 2004