A reader called Malcom hired one of the many GoCar vehicles that are parked around Dublin and drove it for 30 minutes in the city, after which the car broke down and he found that he had lost a particularly savage game of financial Russian roulette.
And he did so without so much as a phone call from the company to explain what was going on.
That is the short version of a much longer story Malcolm has to share.
“I booked a GoCar on Sunday, March 2nd, and drove it for 20 minutes from Fitzwilliam Square to a nearby football pitch, parked and watched a kids’ football match for an hour, and then drove another 10 minutes, delivering a friend home to Mount Merrion,” his email begins.
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When he got to his friend’s house, the car stopped working.
“I found I could neither reverse nor go forward. I contacted GoCar through the chatbot. They said they would call out assistance,” he writes. “I left the car where it was parked. I wasn’t offered a replacement car and my plans for the rest of the morning were ruined.”
A ruined Sunday was only the start of his problems. “The following day, I saw that two large sums of money, €287 and €1,650, had been removed from my account. Thinking this was fraud, I blocked the card. This caused extreme inconvenience and stress, as I was travelling,” he writes.
“On learning that the sum had been removed by GoCar, I assumed this was done in error and emailed asking for a refund,” writes Malcolm.
Despite the large sum of money involved, GoCar did not display much by way of urgency and failed to respond to Malcolm’s email, so he sent a follow-up.
“I then received a brief and casual response, which said that ‘after a thorough inspection, it was confirmed that the issue was related to the clutch’ and ‘this type of damage is typically classified as customer misuse’. And since I had not taken out insurance, they were landing me with the full repair cost.”
He was also hit with a charge of about €300 because he had failed to return the car in a timely fashion. This is despite the fact that he could not possibly have returned it anywhere because the GoCar wouldn’t go.
In the days that followed, writes Malcolm, GoCar was “forced to admit a series of errors”.
On my demanding to see the mechanic’s report, I was informed that they were waiting to ‘receive the full report’ and that this would take some days
— Malcolm
He had been incorrectly charged the late return fee €287.96, “which wasn’t applicable as I had reported the issue immediately”, he writes.
He adds that GoCar also admitted that his card was charged without notification, “which is against company policy in the case of large sums – apparently ‘the colleague who usually investigates these damages was on annual leave at the time of this incident’”.
He also says that the mechanic’s report detailed charges amounting to €1,422.99 but he was incorrectly charged €1,650. “No explanation was given for this,” he writes.
“In addition to these over-charges, which they had to refund, GoCar produced a garbled and confused explanation around the issues with the car,” he says.
On March 8th he was told that “the issue was with the clutch. I was then told on March 11th that it was a gear problem. It then reverted to being a clutch problem and, on March 13th, I was told they had initially thought it was a battery issue.
He says that in the first email concerning the matter he received on March 8th, he was told that “a thorough investigation” had determined the issue.
“On my demanding to see the mechanic’s report, I was informed that they were waiting to ‘receive the full report’ and that this would take some days. When the report was finally sent to me, on March 19th, the date of inspection was given as March 18th. GoCar was unable to produce ‘the thorough investigation’ of March 3rd, which they had claimed as the basis for charging me with such unseemly haste.
“In short, GoCar displayed their incompetence and opportunism at every turn. While apologising and refunding, they have clung to their stance that I was responsible for damaging the clutch and are refusing to return the €1,422.99.”
It appears to be GoCar’s business model that any mechanical failure in a car is the responsibility of whoever happens to be driving it at that time
— Malcolm
Malcolm says that his position throughout has been “that I drove with my habitual calm – I’ve had no accidents or insurance claims in 35 years of driving – and that a friend was in the car with me when it malfunctioned and can testify that I did nothing untoward. I maintain – based on long experience of driving, and on conversations with mechanics – that the issue was probably one of wear and tear: clutches get worn down through usage over years, especially in cars rented out to multiple users.”
He says he “demanded from GoCar the evidence that would demonstrate that I solely was responsible and that the damage could not have been inflicted by previous users.”
It was at this point that he got the mechanic’s report, which he says “appears to be a general condition report. It indicates problems with the front bumper, with the radiator crossmember, with the manual gearbox, with the clutch and with the release bearing. I was charged for all these issues, including those which had nothing to do with the breakdown of the car. In addition the report details a ‘light accident’. There was no accident or impact, as [my friend] can testify.”
He says that on the substantive issue with the clutch, “the report detailed that, ‘This was not a manufacturing issue with Renault. Due to the excessively worn disc and excessive heat spots on the pressure plate, this would indicate driver error.’ And ‘There is evidence that the vehicle clutch assembly required replacement [to] drive and strong burnt clutch [odour] from the gearbox.’ ”
He points out that he “drove the car for a total of 30 minutes. How in this time could I ‘excessively wear down the disc’ and ‘cause excessive heat on the pressure plate’? Nowhere does the report indicate that the last user was solely responsible for the damage and I think it unlikely that the mechanic would hold to this untenable position under questioning. The ‘excessive wear down’ suggests this happened over time.”
Malcolm points out that GoCar hires its cars out to multiple users, “not all of whom take great care with rental vehicles. It was my misfortune that the clutch finally gave up when I was in the car. It appears to be GoCar’s opportunistic business model that any mechanical failure in a car is the responsibility of whoever happens to be driving it at that time. I’ve had my share of bad customer service but nothing so shocking.”
We contacted the company and were told that it had “reviewed the details”, after which it was in direct contact with Malcolm “to apologise for the poor communications and the issues this caused”.
In a statement the company said that it was “abnormal for the customer contact to have involved so many different people. This was, unfortunately, due to some holiday leave overlaps among various teams and team members at GoCar and a particularly busy rental period.
“GoCar fully appreciates how this would have been stressful for their customer and has been in contact with him. GoCar always aims to be as a helpful and clear as possible but on this occasion the communication and customer care was not what it should have been.
“Learning from what happened, the company has made some changes to processes internally to improve customer contact. And GoCar has also, as a measure of goodwill and recognising the impact of its poor communication on this occasion, given their customer a full refund on the charges.”
