Judges and bailiffs very rarely shoot anyone in the back. Cops do. That’s reason enough for me to forgo an encounter with pigs. Especially seattle pigs who killed enough people to require federal oversight.
18 Likes
How much does it cost to rent the vehicle? If he’s really concerned about the hassle, and no one will tow it and the company won’t get it, why not rent it for $10, and park it on the street or in a parking lot?
3 Likes
On reflection, paying the danegeld is a fitting metaphor for late-stage capitalism. Ride-share as a protection racket. 
24 Likes
The general rule for anything here, is to be as passive aggressive as possible.
12 Likes
They don’t want to set the precedent that they are responsible for the actions of their users.
7 Likes
Or their contractors. A central principle of any “gig economy” company.
Some handle SNAFUs better than others, though. When a scammy AirBnB host* cancelled at the very last minute the company bent over backwards to make sure I’d have a comparable place to stay in the area for the night at the same rate and arranged for a taxi while they found another place, again at the same rate.
[* a property manager who double or triple booked the property on multiple sites to get the highest rate]
10 Likes
Rent the car and park it in on the lawn front of the CEO’s house. With 4 flat tires.
9 Likes
He really should have had it towed. As a corporate car, there’s no one to garner any sympathy should it be taken.
I’m reminded of a story my parents told me about how, not long after moving into their house, there was construction work being done on the road and the workers decided to park, without permission, all their equipment in my parent’s back yard (at the time it was unfenced). (The equipment, being heavy, was not just in the way, but also compressed and damaged the soil.) I think it would have been funny had my parents erected some manner of fence after finding the equipment there.
2 Likes
Car2Go should just have posted it on their app as a free ride, to be collected in the next 30 minutes, or some such.
4 Likes
The narrative goes, he tried to had it towed.
Imagine being a tow truck company and having to decide to either tow one of the many privately owned sedans wrongfully parking somewhere or a car clearly labeled as being the property of a multinational car sharing corporation who might sue you for loss of earnings or whatever their fleet of in-house lawyers might come up with.
And Car2go’s behaviour and threat towards the owner of the driveway show this is exactly what would happen.
10 Likes
The cops do nothing about reports of abandoned vehicles (that don’t block traffic) here in Portland OR. I’ve seen numerous instances of this on NextDoor where the vehicle is abandoned on a residential street for months and everyone on the block has contacted the police numerous times. And there is a law against street storage.
4 Likes
I’m sorry your cops aren’t proactive on reports of abandoned cars where you live; that’s annoying. Again, if you can, get your friends together for an old fashioned car push and roll it out into the right of way. Garans the city or county will get involved then.
7 Likes
I love this idea. Unfortunately, car2go is headquartered in Austin TX, half a continent away from Seattle. Yet another way corporations get away with murder.
5 Likes
According to the articlementioned above he called three tow companies and Car2Go
3 Likes
How else could we discover that Digg still exists 
8 Likes
I wonder about that, though. He clearly didn’t try very hard. If someone obstructs - much less parks in - your driveway, that’s pretty unambiguously a situation where that car can be towed. The idea that the towing companies thought people might have thought it was a public parking area is pretty absurd, and I can’t imagine they’d be cowed by the idea the car was owned by a ride-sharing company.
But if that was really the case, he should have pushed it out of the spot and called the towing company because it was blocking his parking.
I think it’s a common problem in areas that are feeling budget pinches. Locally, the city deals with abandoned vehicles (and take about twenty times longer to respond than they used to), and the cops deal only with stolen abandoned vehicles. Which leads to weird situations like when I reported an abandoned vehicle, the city did nothing, but a month later a cop randomly driving by sees it, runs the license plate and finds it’s stolen and within a few hours the owner retrieves it. About a month after that, the city sends me a message telling me they are closing the abandoned vehicle report because they came out to check and it had already been moved…
5 Likes
Here’s a malicious idea:
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Buy a car boot
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Print out a sticker with the car2go logo and URL on it
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Put the sticker on the boot
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Put the boot on the car
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Watch the next poor schmuck who tries to rent the car trying to contact car2go about the “official” car2go boot that’s disabling the car
Mind you, none of this gets the fucking car off your property, and you’d be out $60 on the boot, and it’s pretty mean to the innocent schmuck, so I’m not proposing this as a solution, but it would raise the headache value for car2go, which seems a worthy goal in itself.
4 Likes
He might have to wait until he can claim it as abandoned property, which could be anywhere from a week to a year, depending on the local laws. He probably does have the right to charge for storage while waiting though.
3 Likes
Yeah when we introduced tow-away zones in my city the police were given a procedure to follow for stolen vehicle reports. They first run the registration in the towing database to see if it has been towed. Of course that only happens some times so a lot of towed cars get reported as stolen.
1 Like
