It also sucks trying to get things back that you forget in a shared car. I know a driver who let her wallet slip down the side of the passenger seat. After a bunch of failed attempts to tell her the location of the vehicle so she could check herself, the company went to look, a week later, but they didn't check the side of the passenger seat. Then the car got shipped 500 miles away for service. Six months later she received a call that they'd found her wallet, but of course everything had been replaced by then. And even then it was a hassle to get it shipped and picked up.
I left my checkbook in the glove compartment for like a month before realizing it. I don't write physical checks often and just forgot it was in there after needing to hide it real quick.
For many people, a car ends up storing a good variety of things they would need for very few trips, but only on said trips. e.g., if you only need your gym clothes on days when you stop by the gym on the way home from work, you don't need to have planned that stop before leaving for work in the morning if you keep a set of gym clothes in the car.
It's like having a really, really big purse or backpack.
Additionally, if I spill something in my car, oh well, maybe I'll steam clean the upholstery after a few months of such spills, but if I spill something in a shared vehicle, that seems worse to me--letting the mess build up for a few months impinges on others.
People regularly left their stuff in my cab. At first I wasn't so good about checking, but eventually looking in the back seat became a habit. One fellow was going to give a business presentation. After he got out, I looked in the back seat and saw his ipad. He was very appreciative.
How can you not notice that you are in the wrong car? Different people have different stuff lying around in their cars. Stickers, scratches, dents, dirt. Cars smell differently.
This is an embarrassing story, but one time I left my car running outside a coffee shop while I had coffee with a prospective employer for about an hour. When I got to my car it was no longer running but it was blisteringly hot because I had left the heat blasting, and there was a note on the dash that said "I turned your car off, I hope that's ok, your keys are in the console". So yeah, sometimes and in some places stuff doesn't get stolen when it could.
That sounds like a real life nightmare to me. I have to be able to depend on my transportation. It’s going to be excessively costly and stressful for me to rely on someone else in that case. Completely unacceptable behavior from a car.
I associate cars with constant paranoia. Will I run out of gas, will my tire explode because I forgot to put enough air in it (or put too much), will I lose focus for a second and kill a family of four? If I leave my car somewhere, will it still be there when I come back? If it isn't, was it stolen? Was it towed? How will I find out, and what will I do if I'm able to find out? Will it disappear when I am sleeping, or will parts of it disappear along with a broken window?
Or... I could put a card in my wallet. I could tap my wallet on a turnstile[1], a gate slides open, a train arrives every 5 minutes or so, and I ride anywhere in the city for a flat rate. This seems a lot "cooler" than dealing with maintaining my own personal transport pod.
[1] in Boston, in New York you still have to take it out and swipe.
They can tell by which way you enter the car. This is problematic since women commonly put their purse in the passenger seat sometimes via the passenger door.
Keys... hah easy, we have actually been searching our car in the 15-30 minute range.. trying to remember when and why we last drove it, and where we parked - and as I write that right now I cannot remember again where it is right now :/
This is most useful when you are renting or borrowing a car. If you don't check before you hop into the car, you need to physically exit the car and move it if you guessed incorrectly.
A couple times when I worked for a very large company, with an ocean of cars in the lot, I had to resort to hitting the open trunk button and walking around looking for that.
If there's nobody around you can hit the panic button too.
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