CDTA's CDTA Drive
Feb. 27th, 2023 01:28 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
scrottieQuick braindump before I lose it. The Web stuff and app are care of miocar.org, which looks like it started via government funding in CA. The app is HTML/JS framed as an app. Your session will time out without any notification and it'll just not work, if you leave it open, so you have to close and re-open the app to unlock the car again if you stop somewhere. There seems to be a thing where it pretends the car isn't available currently for any time period in the next approximately 20 minutes, so you can't suddenly decide you want a car, walk up to the car, and check it out, even if it is available. You have to wait. But then it'll let you start your reservation five minutes early. Since that's all undocumented, I'm sure it's all subject to change. I had the idea of not checking out the car until I was there and saw it because it's all too easy to reserve a car, not have the car actually be there or anywhere the app can find, and still get charged for it. So yeah, if a car just completely goes off the network, it looks like it keeps publishing its last known location indefinitely without any warning that the car has vanished from reporting its location, so you can go on a wild goose chase. If you want a car for a few hours in the afternoon, for example, you might spend a lot of time on the app putting in different times and repeatedly have all of the little green cars show as muted, dim green, indicating that they aren't available before eventually if ever finding a time slot when they aren't reserved. You have to try and guess when they're available. The app won't tell you. On the computer, your session also expires without any JS alerting you that it has, so things will just suddenly stop working and then pages that are valid will start giving 404 errors, which is completely the wrong HTTP status for not being auth'd. Bizarrely, CDTA's site links to a login page that does this, so it looks like (and is the case) that the sign-up shows a 404 error. So, in other words, the whole thing is an absolute garbage user experience in the way that SF/SV tech almost invariably is these days. Way more effort is put in to trying to make a slick, minimal user experience than actually at any point doing the sane, reasonable, helpful thing, so you get this annoying barbie UI. Oh yeah did I mention that the app will randomly log you out, so you could have the car somewhere outside of the city, come back out intending to unlock it, but you've been logged out, and used a good random password you could not possibility remember, and your email isn't connected to your phone so you can't do an email password reset. So use that old college password that was compromised a decade ago but you won't forget, I guess. Or if your phone battery dies, you aren't unlocking that car or calling for help.
The Chevy Volts will tell you when they are charging, for a moment at least, and sometimes they'll tell you when they aren't charging, just for a moment, so you have to watch the dashboard to figure it out. I've had issues with it failing to charge when it was really cold. I got hung up once on one charging station that has two wires/plugs, and they were crossed over, so I was grabbing the wrong one, and it couldn't deal with that, and it also couldn't deal with having a plug from the other side still plugged in to the base on the charger when the correct one was inserted, so it took me a while to figure that out. I had to unplug both, plug both back in to the correct base, do the RFID thing, then put the correct one in the car. I've now spent a lot of time in subzero weather futzing with chargers. It's a learning curve. Gas pumps malfunction in lots of interesting ways, including in the cold. I once tried to fuel my brother's van in MN and had the pump get stuck on and refuse to turn off until the cashier hit the emergency off button. Cars like a lot of modern cars will continue to accelerate as long as you're touching the gas at all, just accelerate at different rates, which I find extremely annoying. It has piles of electronics and fancy systems and I have to keep taking my foot on and off of the gas to not go 70 in a 30 zone. It's less spazzy about that than some other rentals I've driven but I find that maddening. Foot very lightly on the gas should be slow, down a little should be medium speed, and down most or all of the way should be fast. It should be possible to hold a constant speed of your choice. Hate. Likewise, they decided that any interaction with an electrical system on the car should be read as a cue to turn the radio back on. You can push the radio volume knob in and hold it down until the radio turns off, but then as soon as you push the button to turn the automatic high beams off, it turns the radio back on. Switch in to reverse and the backup cam comes on... and so does the radio. I haven't found any way to turn the radio off except to turn the volume all the way down. Adjusting cabin temp turns the radio back on. "Off" is meaningless. On the road on a bicycle or a rental car, I've noticed a lot of people flashing high beams at me and I was wondering about that, but driving these little bastards, I know the answer now... automatic high beam thinks its perfectly fine to just constantly turn the high beams on and off for no reason, and to do that in residential neighborhoods at low speed. People who program computers are all raging idiots. Programmers in San Francisco *have* to be completely coddled like the giant manchildren they are because they really don't have any idea about how anything in the real world functions. The Volt's body is plastic and they take dings like no one's business, but otherwise, they seem ok. These cars have like 5,000 miles on them and they're a moonscape of tiny craters. It's kind of making me think I need to mod an electric bakfiets in to being able to do 50mph so I can do the unavoidable stretches of shoulderless highway. Anyway, since they put three different RFID keycards on the same ring, I've sometimes had to shield all but one with my arm to keep the charging bases from first reading the wrong one then complaining that it's the wrong one, like if you were to take three different RFID bus cards and flop them on top the bus RFID reader at once it would just error. The air freshers are noxious. At least half of drivers are raging assholes.
The Chevy Volts will tell you when they are charging, for a moment at least, and sometimes they'll tell you when they aren't charging, just for a moment, so you have to watch the dashboard to figure it out. I've had issues with it failing to charge when it was really cold. I got hung up once on one charging station that has two wires/plugs, and they were crossed over, so I was grabbing the wrong one, and it couldn't deal with that, and it also couldn't deal with having a plug from the other side still plugged in to the base on the charger when the correct one was inserted, so it took me a while to figure that out. I had to unplug both, plug both back in to the correct base, do the RFID thing, then put the correct one in the car. I've now spent a lot of time in subzero weather futzing with chargers. It's a learning curve. Gas pumps malfunction in lots of interesting ways, including in the cold. I once tried to fuel my brother's van in MN and had the pump get stuck on and refuse to turn off until the cashier hit the emergency off button. Cars like a lot of modern cars will continue to accelerate as long as you're touching the gas at all, just accelerate at different rates, which I find extremely annoying. It has piles of electronics and fancy systems and I have to keep taking my foot on and off of the gas to not go 70 in a 30 zone. It's less spazzy about that than some other rentals I've driven but I find that maddening. Foot very lightly on the gas should be slow, down a little should be medium speed, and down most or all of the way should be fast. It should be possible to hold a constant speed of your choice. Hate. Likewise, they decided that any interaction with an electrical system on the car should be read as a cue to turn the radio back on. You can push the radio volume knob in and hold it down until the radio turns off, but then as soon as you push the button to turn the automatic high beams off, it turns the radio back on. Switch in to reverse and the backup cam comes on... and so does the radio. I haven't found any way to turn the radio off except to turn the volume all the way down. Adjusting cabin temp turns the radio back on. "Off" is meaningless. On the road on a bicycle or a rental car, I've noticed a lot of people flashing high beams at me and I was wondering about that, but driving these little bastards, I know the answer now... automatic high beam thinks its perfectly fine to just constantly turn the high beams on and off for no reason, and to do that in residential neighborhoods at low speed. People who program computers are all raging idiots. Programmers in San Francisco *have* to be completely coddled like the giant manchildren they are because they really don't have any idea about how anything in the real world functions. The Volt's body is plastic and they take dings like no one's business, but otherwise, they seem ok. These cars have like 5,000 miles on them and they're a moonscape of tiny craters. It's kind of making me think I need to mod an electric bakfiets in to being able to do 50mph so I can do the unavoidable stretches of shoulderless highway. Anyway, since they put three different RFID keycards on the same ring, I've sometimes had to shield all but one with my arm to keep the charging bases from first reading the wrong one then complaining that it's the wrong one, like if you were to take three different RFID bus cards and flop them on top the bus RFID reader at once it would just error. The air freshers are noxious. At least half of drivers are raging assholes.
