Times
For the Nagoya work I have been traveling by Times Car Share from the hotel to each day’s site.
We registered our company with the service a few years ago but didn’t use it until last year. I was in Tohoku and needed to get from Kitakami to Odate—basically over a mountain range through untrain[🚃]-ed territory (otherwise it was pleasant Tohoku Shinkansen and local-line train travel). The client had a policy prohibiting non-employees from riding in their cars or ones they had rented, to avoid problems of responsibility if the vehicle were to get into a crash. (Hurrah for such policies. I enjoy the company of this and most other clients, and I also need to be alone except when I am gregariously doing the work with them. Consulting on-site is intensive human interaction that requires recovery.)
I am sure that many of you are even more familiar with Times than I am.
A Times car costs my company 5,500 yen to use for 12 hours. Around Nagoya, my main work sites are inconvenient to train stations. I could take the train from central Nagoya to the nearest station and then get a taxi to the site. It would work out to not much less than the Times price, with much more friction and waiting and uncertainty and imposing on others. Traveling to Nagoya from my part of Tokyo takes around 3 hours by train and 4 hours by car. I very well may exchange that hour each way for the full mobility of my own vehicle on future trips.
Things I like about Times:
-No interaction with a single human soul
-Test-driving a variety of vehicles
-The robust app that shows a map of vehicles nearby that are available for your reservation period, including what make/model of vehicle
-The many clever innovations by which they make human-interaction-less operations work
This last is pretty cool. For example, they don’t have a strict rule to fuel the vehicle, lest they charge you a thousand dollars per liter, the way a lot of US rental agencies do (or did in the past, at least). They just reward you for fueling and/or washing by discounting what you ultimately get charged. (Do not ask me the exact rates and amounts, because I am far too lazy to have researched these.) They do this by installing sensors to remotely measure the fuel level before and after your use of the vehicle. If you wash, you can self-report it in the app. There are all kinds of details and scenarios where this might differ, but you get the point. They remove many friction points from the car rental experience.
The Times site explaining how fueling and washing are rewarded
My favorite ride lately has been the Toyota Yaris. It’s a very compact car with just a bit of pep and lots of nimbleness. I have been in the hybrid version, which functions nicely. It also has a convenient ledge under the center dashboard screen where my iPhone can rest horizontally and show me the way.
The act of choosing a car based primarily on availability and not appearance or speed or other factors causes me to think of cars differently: Having experienced the level of ease of using Times, I could forego owning a car in some scenarios if Times were sufficiently available. Currently, though, there are not enough Times cars reliably available near my home. I also like to have a company-owned vehicle for tax and personal reasons, including the knowledge that I have a stocked trekking backpack and hiking getup in the back for pleasure or emergency situations. And knowing that when I drop a Mcdonald’s fry or fries through the gap between the center console and my seat, those fries will vex no one but me.
Another ancillary thing about Times is the random parking lots in which the cars are stationed. You cannot pick one up at one place and leave it in another. A Times car has a home. The ones that were available to me most of last week live on the 7th floor of a pachinko parlor parking garage. I became a pachinko commuter of sorts. The place was dead in the morning, but upon returning in the evening I got to ride the elevator with its diverse patrons. And if I took a particular elevator, it deposited me into the parlor itself. Surprisingly, I had never been in one. It was suffused with the hoary reek of Gamblor, from whom I am lately estranged.
Other parking spots include my hotel’s basement parking (these cars usually get snapped up too fast for my abysmal advance planning), a condominium down the street, and a Times coin parking lot next door. There are so many Times parking lots alone in Japan, and when you add a lot of other ones, it becomes an impressive network that far outshines any rental car company, and probably all of them put together.
When a lot is fee-based and would require one to pay to exit, they have created a pass that is inserted into the toll machine when entering and exiting. To prevent people from forgetting to leave the pass in the vehicle, it is slotted in an apparatus on the driver-side visor. When the card is not in the slot, the apparatus plays an annoying-at-first-but-lowkey-banger tune that cannot be ignored. (I am elated that this was of course on YouTube.)
The most basic and important innovation is that one only needs to use their Times-issued IC card to unlock the car, by touching it to a card-shaped mark on the back window that is connected to a sensor. From there one retrieves the car keys from the glove box. The keychain is shaped to fit into a slot in the glove box that has an electronic sensor in it. This allows the system to know if the person has indeed returned the keys to their position after use before locking the vehicle using the IC card. The moment you re-lock the car following use, Times sends an email confirming the car’s return. It’s very slick.
I haven’t tested or checked, but I’m pretty sure the system is set up so that the car wouldn’t start if you were to break the window and steal the keys out of the glove box. Also, car theft, while absolutely a thing in Japan, is probably not common enough for this to be a big worry anyway, especially for pedestrian Times vehicles.
When you have stopped the car and then started it again, there is a voice message that chides you for any sudden braking or accelerations detected during the previous drive. It’s an okay feature, but feels unfair when you have had to do one or both of those things for innocent reasons.
When I drive my own car in daily life and see Times cars amongst us (the yellow Times sticker is very visible on the back of each car), I assume that the driver is not skilled and give them extra space and benefit of the doubt, and occasionally criticize their driving in my head. I am often right to do these things. Driving one myself therefore forces a certain humility: I know that other drivers view me the same way, and possibly add to that a non-Japan-born-and-maybe-also-tourist-driver face assessment. On top of that there is the feeling of not being in the vehicle that one thinks suits oneself best, which is a profoundly 20th-century mentality that I still possess. “I AM A GOOD DRIVER (Gold™︎-licensed too, but the kind who actually drives) AND USUALLY DRIVE A CAR THAT IS MORE SUITED TO MY PREFERENCE THAN THIS ONE,” says the placard I’ll someday print and affix to each Times car I use.
Because I was a brief but avid user of Times cars stationed in Morioka, I get emails notifying me of new locations created there. This should annoy but somehow doesn’t. It’s my one gossamer tie to the city and reminds me of liking it.
The Times system seems good to incentivize people away from owning a car, and its expansion ought to exponentially make that happen. One major improvement I want to see is an alarm that will tell me when I have left my coffee mug in a car upon return.