BMW’s car-sharing service launches—and almost lands Ars a ticket

SEATTLE—Between world-class transit cities like New York and sprawling, highway-filled metropolises like Houston sits a mobility middle-ground. Sometimes, a dense city quickly grows beyond its means and you end up with a population explosion—with a glut of road-rage issues to match.

What's a person to do if they want to ditch their car in a city full of traffic and parking issues—particularly my hometown of Seattle, which is going through transit nightmares thanks to a tech-hiring boom—but can't depend on lagging buses and trains? For roughly six years, Car2Go (owned by Daimler AG) has offered its car-sharing service in Seattle and other cities around the world as an in-between option. Now, German rival BMW apparently wants in on this action in North America. After a beta trial in San Francisco throughout 2015, BMW's ReachNow service officially launched in Seattle on Friday, and I proceeded to take it for a weekend-long spin.

While the service's weirdest and most intriguing offerings are still a ways off, the basic idea—pay by the minute to cruise in a BMW—has already accelerated smoothly from 0 to 60mph. Well, that's except for the time I almost got a moving violation ticket.

Less Smart, more fast, please

ReachNow's launch event promised Seattle drivers many new mobility options to come. The company also plans on future launches in three other North American cities this year and a total of ten metropolitan areas at some indeterminate point. But before we get into what makes this service distinct, let's break down its basic idea for the car-sharing uninitiated—and how familiar its services already sound to BMW's pilot city.

This launch incarnation heavily resembles Car2Go's services, which have been available in Seattle since 2012. Either reserve a car via a smartphone app (which finds the nearest available car via GPS) or walk up to a participating car and tap it with an RFID-enabled card to start a trip. (If the car has been reserved by someone else, you can't take it by tapping unless the other person's 30-minute reservation limit has expired.)

The idea for both services is that once you enter your PIN number and start the ignition, you pay a per-minute rate to drive anywhere you want so long as you park it within the service's designated area. This differs from services such as Zipcar, which require users to return cars to the parking lot that a trip began in.

Signing up for both services requires submitting a credit card and a driver's license, but ReachNow offers an interesting instant signup option. Take photos of both sides of your driver's license, then take a selfie, and the app will compare the images before automatically confirming your membership. We were able to get multiple Ars staffers signed up this way, though we didn't test whether we could fool the system with print-out photos.

Gas, street-meter parking, and limited insurance are included in both services' $0.41-per-minute rate—which ReachNow copied for its launch but will "soon" raise to $0.49. However, we found a clause in the EULA that grants ReachNow the right to apply "dynamic pricing" to its rate, which BMW reps said they do not plan to activate within the service "at this time." There's no other monthly or annual cost, other than a one-time lifetime membership fee. Right now, ReachNow is offering free lifetime memberships to any licensed American drivers, so you may want to sign up for it if you think you'll ever use BMW's ridesharing services in Seattle or wherever else the service will launch.

The idea is, should you want to drive somewhere (work, a movie, a friend's house), you can hop into either a Car2Go or ReachNow car near your starting point and then leave your car behind at your destination for someone else in that neighborhood to rent and take wherever they please. Car2Go has proven this functionality's demand and feasibility in 30 cities. I can only speak anecdotally as a Seattle resident, but I rarely struggle to find a Car2Go when I want to drive. So long as I'm not intoxicated, I save money choosing to drive myself in one of the company's cars over hiring a taxi or ride-share service for a one-way trip. (In fact, as a car owner, sometimes I'll still opt to use one of these services just to avoid paying for downtown parking.)

What's different with BMW's offering, then? It starts with those cars.

Car2Go's Smart ForTwo cars come equipped with 89 bhp engines (and the world's very worst semi-automatic gearbox), which may very well get the job done in Car2Go's pilot city of Austin, Texas. In cities like Seattle, however, hills and inclines put a real strain on those little cars, and ReachNow handles this city much better with its car options: the MINI Cooper, the all-electric i3, and the 328i xDrive sedan.

All three cars (which include automatic transmissions) come equipped with perks you won't find in a ForTwo: heated seats, automatic moonroofs, legitimate leg room, back seats, a standard BMW sound system with Bluetooth functionality, and an engine that ranges from the Mini Cooper's 134 bhp to the 328i xDrive's 240 bhp. Between those power ranges, by the way, sits the i3's potent 170 bhp offering, which our own Jonathan Gitlin described as a pretty solid city-driving car.

Officer, I swear—I was just Reaching Now

After two days of ReachNow car driving in all three models, I found myself seduced by improved across-the-board driving conditions compared to the piddly ForTwo. Hills and passes were no match for how quickly I could rev up to 30mph on city roads and 60mph on highways. I also liked that ReachNow's app allowed drivers to type in a destination address after reserving a car so that the car's on-board navigation system was immediately ready to guide a driver.

This was where I hit my first ReachNow snag, however. I picked up one of the service's 328i cars in front of its new headquarters, and I set the navigation system to guide me to my home address. ReachNow's HQ is in Seattle's dense Belltown district, and a few of its weird roads require drivers to turn left or right at their intersections as opposed to going straight.

ReachNow's mapping system didn't recognize that fact, and my brain was in autopilot mode, happy to have the system tell me where to turn so I could be mindful of the zillions of pedestrians at every intersection. I ran through an intersection illegally and was pulled over. This happened three blocks away from ReachNow HQ. Thankfully for Ars' pockets, the officer let me off with a warning after telling me he had no idea what this ReachNow thing was all about.

To start a ride, you have to turn a dial on the center console to pick through menus and log your PIN number. This dial-button system, which is surrounded by an array of shortcut buttons, sits in the car's center next to the gearshift. It controls nearly every non-vital option and menu in ReachNow's cars. It's harder to parse than Car2Go's mix of a big touchscreen and clear, giant category buttons placed just beneath its ForTwo cars' windshields.

I wish ReachNow offered a guide via its app or site to study the BMW fleet's additional raft of options, buttons, and sliders available on the steering wheel rather than forcing users to learn on the fly in a car they're likely to have never test-driven before. Since the three car types have slightly different combinations of steering wheel, console buttons, and ReachNow screen menu layouts, there's a bit more of a learning curve than car-sharing users might expect.

Worse is the ReachNow cars' tendency to take a while to handshake with the service's controlling servers. Using the app to unlock and lock a car took up to 90 seconds on more than one occasion (an issue I didn't face while using an RFID-enabled membership card to start and end trips). Actually getting to the car's startup screen once my butt was in the seat took as long as 120 seconds. Thankfully, BMW doesn't start its per-minute billing until the car has been started. These delays cost you only in time, not cash, but that usability hurdle needs serious attention.

In the case of Seattle's launch, ReachNow doesn't reach enough of the city. Its initial fleet of 370 cars is less than half of Car2Go's 750-strong car-tillery, and its service map blocks out major neighborhoods such as Lake City, Interbay, West Seattle, and a giant chunk of South Seattle. Ars loaded a Car2Go map that proved high demand in the affected neighborhoods, too. When asked when these areas would be served by ReachNow, the company's CCO Sandra Phillips insisted that "we’re looking and listening to residents that live in these neighborhoods to see where the next best expansions are."

Good for branding? Or awful for branding?

These are the kinds of issues that should be addressed before ReachNow follows through on some of its more ambitious plans. For one, ReachNow will eventually offer rides for hire. Based on BMW board member Peter Schwarzenbauer's statements about "top-level" services and licensed BMW drivers, that service may prove pricier than Uber or Lyft—and will therefore miss the point. Similarly, ReachNow will eventually offer to bring its cars to your doorstep as opposed to making users walk a few blocks to grab one off the street, though we don't know when that service will launch nor how much such a direct-to-door service will cost.

Schwarzenbauer also wants current BMW and Mini car owners to join ReachNow's car-sharing pool and lend their cars to strangers "if you’re away for vacation for a week or on a business trip and your car isn’t being used." He wasn't forthcoming about rates that participating cars owners could expect to be paid, nor when such a program would launch (let alone the issue of private car owners installing ReachNow's GPS-tracking sensors and any corresponding privacy issues). Joining such a rental system might make sense as a path to a discount on BMW car ownership or a way to score free maintenance in exchange for letting strangers put their feet on your pedals. Otherwise, it's hard to imagine a high-paying BMW or Mini owner being so desperate for a percentage of that $0.49/minute rate.

BMW and ReachNow reps teased future options such as longer-term rentals and car sharing limited to "closed user groups"—which sounds to us like a way for Seattle companies to enlist ReachNow cars for a dedicated corporate carpool service. As with its other future teases, BMW didn't have price or timing estimates handy.

Should any of those services launch with reasonable prices or worthwhile functionality boosts, they'll just be icing on ReachNow's smooth-driving cake. Even with these complaints in mind—and the fact that "ReachNow" is an awkward name that sounds more like a smartphone sexual favor app—it's hard to argue with a 20 percent bump in car-sharing price for such niceties as seat warmers, a backseat, and a killer engine.

We're curious how this service will play out in the hands of average, licensed drivers. Will BMW gain branding cache among young drivers, eager to drive something—anything—better than a ForTwo, earning customers for life as they settle into such comfy, pre-warmed seats? Conversely, will a bunch of wild, inexperienced drivers send this BMW fleet careening into walls and other cars and make the BMW brand look worse as a result? And how will the 70 i3 cars in Seattle be taken care of in terms of recharging, since as we noted in our review, the cars have a rather meager range and take a long time to recharge? During the press conference, Schwarzenbauer admitted that ReachNow's electric fleet size is contingent on the city of Seattle being "ready to do the next step"—meaning, to pay for and build more electric car charging stations.

While that plays out, I plan to keep both of my memberships active. But whenever my intended trips take place in ReachNow's smaller "home zone," you can place a pretty safe bet on the first car-sharing app I'm going to load.

Listing image by Sam Machkovech