[noego]

> Still, cars without reception become vulnerable in a few scenarios: ... when the vehicle battery dies. That last scenario was the one my family and I found ourselves in

This seems like a major detail that should have been mentioned near the headline. Even if they got into the car, they would still have been stuck because the car battery was dead.

Every new technology comes with its own unique foibles and failure scenarios. One can easily imagine the very first automobile drivers getting frustrated by how their car becomes a useless lump of metal within minutes as soon as they run out of gas. "If I just had my trusty horse, this would never happen!" Fear mongering around these new failure modes makes for a fun pastime, but fundamentally pointless, unless we also consider the benefits they bring to the table.

[xkcd-sucks]

Jumper cables and spare gas cans have been a thing for quite some time; and Li-Ion battery boosters which can start a car multiple times are small enough to carry in a pocket. Everyone driving in the wilderness should have these things in the trunk in addition to a spare tire and some water. The majority of problems which strand people are flat tires / dead batteries / overheating / no gas; which are all trivial to fix on one's own with preparedness appropriate to the environment.

Furthermore, mechanics are readily available in rural areas; and when horse transportation was common, farriers and vets were also common. These people drive out to your location and fix stuff, although you might need to walk to them without a phone. And any rural mechanic can hack a fix to the mechanical components of an internal combustion engine well enough to get it home.

So, if you accept Zipcar's terms of service ("don't remove our interlock / hack the ECU"), this is fundamentally different because it's a failure mode which only Zipcar can fix.