[HN Gopher] Berlin car sharing startup Miles demands EUR13k from... ___________________________________________________________________ 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). ___________________________________________________________________ (page generated 2021-01-13 23:00 UTC)