Parallax Launches City Car Club App
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This month, Parallax were proud to launch the official iPhone app for City Car Club. City Car Club is Britain’s largest car club, providing its members with 24/7 access to hundreds of vehicles around the country. The cars are conveniently located in designated parking bays near to where you live and work.
City Car Club’s booking management system allows their members to book shared cars in 16 cities around the UK. By going online and selecting a vehicle and a time slot, a device in the vehicle allows the user to gain access to it using a smart card which is touched on the windscreen.
Parallax have made this process even easier with the introduction of the City Car Club app. We’ve built a bespoke app which brings all of the functionality of the website onto the iPhone (Android version coming soon). Now members can find a car they want, book it, find its location and get directions, and then unlock and lock it from within the app, removing the need for the smart card completely.
The main challenge for us when building the app was getting it to ‘shake-hands’ with City Car Club’s very complex vehicle management system; the system that tells the cars when they are booked and who should be able to access them. Our solution was to write a bespoke API that handles all of the booking information on a separate intermediary server, which then passes on all the relevant information to their system quickly and securely.
We’ve created a great app which should help making car sharing that little bit quicker and easier when you’re out and about. Given that each City Car Club car helps to take 24 privately owned cars off the road, we’d like to think that alongside them, we’re helping the environment out too.
Find the City Car Club app on iTunes