[HN Gopher] Berlin car sharing startup Miles demands EUR13k from...
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Berlin car sharing startup Miles demands EUR13k from customer whose
car was stolen
Author : camillomiller
Score : 41 points
Date : 2021-01-13 22:08 UTC (51 minutes ago)
(HTM) web link (www.mobilegeeks.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.mobilegeeks.com)
| jarym wrote:
| Startup must be... cash strapped and just discovered their own
| insurers refused to cover the claim?
| camillomiller wrote:
| Sounds very probable. Last investment was a 5m round led by
| Lukas Gadowski back in late 2019. Talk of the town is that
| they've already been kept alive multiple times by cash
| injections as private loans. Still, they're alive enough to
| mess their customers life and impose lawyers fees on them.
| jonplackett wrote:
| Why isn't the car insured anyway?
| camillomiller wrote:
| If you're an insurer, and you find out your client has never
| implemented basic safety measures that have been industry
| standard for 30 years (i.e. an immobilizer), I guess denying
| the claim takes probably minutes.
| mkl95 wrote:
| That headline sums up the European startup scene (I say this
| having worked for a shady German startup myself, that has owed me
| and other former employees money for ages)
| gregoriol wrote:
| What do you mean exactly?
| mkl95 wrote:
| Working for a small European startup sucks. The company will
| ALWAYS find a way to shift the blame when something like this
| happens, not to mention every EU startup I've worked for gets
| away with late payments and shady financial moves (the worst
| offender was a German company I worked for early in my
| career).
| viraptor wrote:
| > Working for a small European startup sucks. The company
| will ALWAYS find a way to shift the blame
|
| Start-ups across ~50 countries? Always doing the same
| thing? I think you may be generalising quite a bit... It's
| not like an SV company would ever shift blame on the
| customer, right? :-)
| HatchedLake721 wrote:
| Yes, "European Startup" is one big homogenous thing, and
| not 30+ countries and half a billion people in population.
| dsnr wrote:
| German companies have a reputation for not giving a shit about
| customers and customer support is virtually non-existent. For
| example you are quite often required to cancel your online
| subscriptions by letters sent by post 1-3 months in advance.
| Slikey wrote:
| 3 months in advance is the legal limit, it's great. We also
| love our contract bindings for 2 years. Cunsumer friendliness
| here is heresy.
| snicksnak wrote:
| It's so bad, there are even companies that handle
| cancelations by mail for you. You enter your contract
| details on their website, they print it and send it by
| registered mail.
| orange_tee wrote:
| Why is a car for hire company called a startup?
| onion2k wrote:
| They have an app.
| camillomiller wrote:
| *They have a React Native contraption struggling to scroll on
| an iPhone 12 Pro Max. Fixed that for you. :)
| orange_tee wrote:
| I know it's a joke, but so do other car for hire companies.
| Ex: https://www.europcar.com/europcar-mobile
| camillomiller wrote:
| Miles claims to be a startup in shared-mobility whose
| mission is to bring transparency to the market. It's not a
| joke, it's on their website.
| ahartmetz wrote:
| The standards for "startups" in Germany are reeeally low.
| Most of them seem to get founded with the motivation "I want
| to be the boss of a startup and / or get rich quick", not "I
| want to do something well".
| jrochkind1 wrote:
| I dunno, why was WeWork? Why is anything?
| cinntaile wrote:
| Because they have a cool app that you use to unlock the car
| with. That makes them a hip new company or in other words a
| startup.
| camillomiller wrote:
| The app is not even cool. Is a React Native contraption
| developed externally. They switched to it last summer,
| exactly around the time when most of the vehicles got stolen,
| by the way. Before that they were using a different app
| connected to a white label solution provided by
| WunderMobility.
| [deleted]
| pkaye wrote:
| Shouldn't their name be in metric units?
| OneGuy123 wrote:
| How can you be so bad at PR & Customer Support in 2021?
|
| The person in charge of this should really go on Facebook every
| once in a while to see what can happen...
| camillomiller wrote:
| The don't have any PR person, so I guess their thought process
| is "if we don't have a PR person, we won't have PR problems".
| camillomiller wrote:
| Here's a tale of how you don't run a mobility startup, unless you
| don't care about the safety of your customers and your public
| image.
|
| Berlin car sharing startup Miles is demanding thousands of Euros
| from customers whose car was stolen, claiming that damages caused
| by thieves while driving the vehicles should be covered by their
| users.
|
| Turns out, Miles has always been leasing their entire car fleet,
| while renting it through a white-label platform they had no
| control over at least until recently. As a result, they failed to
| implement basic industry-standard safety mechanism, such as an
| immobilizer, that all of their competitors have been using for
| years. This, despite their telematics providers all offer the
| immobilizer as a feature.
|
| In one case they're threatening to sue a customer for 13,000EUR,
| during a pandemic. The customer is a bar owner, and faces
| bankruptcy as a result. In that specific case, Miles Mobility
| admitted that the car could be opened and turned on hours after
| the user had ended the rent.
|
| Edit, to add some elements:
|
| - don't miss the part about how customer support suggested not to
| call the police. Twice.
|
| - it's totally unclear how they are not covered by their
| insurance, and how can their investors be fine with all this
| (lead investor is Lukasz Gadowski of Delivery Hero fame, and
| TeamEurope Ventures founder).
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(page generated 2021-01-13 23:00 UTC)