Ahmedabad, February 6, 2026 | 11:30 pm.
The car that ZoomCar handed over to me that night looked abandoned. (See the pic).
Thick dust coated every surface, as if it had not been touched for months. The battery was dead. The GPS did not work. A wiring fault meant the engine would not start at all. This was the vehicle assigned to me at the Ahmedabad pickup point — late at night, fully paid for, and supposedly “ready to drive.”
It was completely undriveable.
I reached the pickup location at around 9 pm. The booking had been made in advance by a relative. What followed was not a delay or a minor inconvenience, but a total systems failure that left me stranded hours later.
Photos and videos taken at the site clearly show the condition of the vehicle at handover. This was not a one-off oversight; it was a car that should never have been approved for rental.
When I contacted ZoomCar’s customer care, I expected urgency. Instead, I was told that no other cars were available and advised to “book an alternative.” There was no immediate replacement offered, no proactive refund, and no acknowledgment of the seriousness of handing over a non-functional vehicle late at night.
Responsibility, it seemed, ended the moment the car failed.
What happened next was even more troubling. An executive on site suggested that the same vehicle owner could arrange another car privately — outside the ZoomCar platform — for an additional cost. This informal proposal, made when a customer is stranded and vulnerable, raises uncomfortable questions about oversight, ethics, and accountability.
As I wrote this at 11:30 pm that same night, I was still waiting. No car was arranged by Zoom Car.
Beyond the immediate inconvenience lies a far more serious concern: safety.
If a car with a nearly dead battery, faulty wiring, and non-functional navigation can be cleared for handover, what checks and balances does ZoomCar actually enforce? And if an accident were to occur due to such failures, who would be responsible — the customer, the individual car owner, or ZoomCar, the platform that facilitated and profited from the rental?
These are not theoretical questions. They matter when a company operates at scale and places people on the road.
ZoomCar markets itself as a dependable self-drive solution. But experiences like this expose a gap between promise and practice. A rental service’s most basic duty is to ensure that a car works. When it does not, everything else — the app, the branding, the convenience — collapses.
As I remained stranded late into the night, one question persisted: Is ZoomCar listening? Or has customer safety become collateral damage in the race to grow?
For travellers, the warning is clear. Convenience means nothing if you are left on the roadside — or at a pickup point — waitin. |
