Beware: GIG car tech can fail in mountains, and they will leave you stranded

Hi everyone - I really appreciate the empathy, concern and similar stories that many of you have shared! We genuinely did not know that you can order an RFID key in the mail as a precaution before potentially leaving cell service areas. We hope that if you decide to use GIG in the future, you now know to do that!

I continue to feel that (a) warnings about leaving cell service areas, which could potentially strand users, should be made prominent before and while driving; and (b) GIG should have better failsafes in place (e.g. agreements with rural WA taxi services or emergency backup key in the car), or at least have eventually told us that no ride was coming for us so that we could be more proactive about finding our own way home while we still had phone battery/daylight/passersby. The biggest problem is that GIG told us to continue to wait for them to send a ride even as we told them we felt unsafe after 3h, and they never sent a vehicle for us, or communicated proactively that we should find our own way home, or followed up to find out if we were still on the mountain even after 24h.

This situation is still unfolding but since it's gained some interest, I'll add updates here:

UPDATE 1:

- We reported this incident to the state attorney general's office following a Redditor's advice in the comments. We're still waiting to hear back.

- We contacted a higher-up at GIG through LinkedIn. They were extremely apologetic and did refund us for the ride and our ~3 previous GIG rides, and asked us what else they could do. We told them we want to know what operating procedure updates are being made on their end to ensure that this never happens to a GIG user again. They tell us that they will keep us in the loop.

/r/Seattle Thread