If you live in a larger city that is served by the Zipcar network and use an Android device the company has a new app that will help you find a car if you need to rent one for a short while. The Zipcar network lets you find a car in your area that you can rent for however long you need. The new app also uses the GPS connectivity of your Android device to put the location of a Zipcar vehicle on a map for you to find easily.
You can use the app to book a car or extend a reservation and if you are having a hard time finding the vehicle in a parking garage you can make the car honk its horn using the app. The app will also unlock or lock the doors. Presumably, that unlocking and honking is only after you reserve so you can’t just go around unlocking all the Zipcars in your area.
Zipcar sounds very interesting for people that don’t own a vehicle or that are traveling in an unfamiliar city. I wonder how the driver gets the keys to the vehicle. If any of you have used Zipcar let us know how it works in the comments. You can grab the app right now directly from the Zipcar page.
The key is inside the car. You use your plastic membership card on the front windscreen to unlock the car (some sort of RFID thing like an Oyster card). Pretty sure the app can talk to Zipcar’s servers over the interwebs which can then unlock the car remotely via GSM/3G telemetry too.
Crashes on Droid 1st Gen upon 1st login attempt and can’t be used. Nice concept poorly implemented.