Ardmore car subscription service Go abruptly cancels 300+ customers and demands vehicles be returned in 10 days

Imagine driving your car for over a year and, despite being current on payments and insurance, being told you have 10 days to give the vehicle back.

That’s the position hundreds of Go subscribers are finding themselves in.

The Ardmore-based company began sending e-mails in early June to subscribers around the country informing them that their subscriptions had been canceled and that they have 10 days to return the vehicles.

“Several factors, notably the current inflationary environment and escalating interest rates, have influenced this outcome,” the email states.

The company began offering long-term vehicle subscriptions in spring 2022, most of them with three-year contracts and often for less than the price of purchasing the vehicle. It’s similar to a lease but with less hassle and no bank involvement. But now about 10% of its roughly 3,400 customers are being asked to return their vehicles.

Dave Ogden, of Ewing, N.J., has subscribed with Go since March 2022, driving a Nissan Pathfinder. He received the email and was faced with a choice: return his vehicle or buy it.

“So we’re getting 10 days to make a $36,000 decision,” Ogden said about the offer to purchase the Pathfinder. “And I told them outright in my text: Car buying in general is something that can take months to plan for and save for.”

Subscribers had signed up for the three-year terms, with insurance, maintenance, and use of the vehicle all rolled into one easy payment — in many cases, cheaper than buying or leasing. The company website even features a section titled “Too good to be true?”

Apparently the answer became “yes” for many.

Michael Beauchamp, CEO of Go, confirmed to The Inquirer that 322 customers had received e-mails canceling their contracts. He expressed contrition about the cancellations but cited sharp increases in interest rates over the past 18 months, causing a portion of the fleet to suffer “excessive negative cash flow.”

“We set out to provide customers an exponentially better offering and experience than the status quo, but we failed these customers,” Beauchamp wrote.

Car subscription services have come and gone over the years, and few of them seem to have found a way to make the economics work. Car tech site Jalopnik said in a 2021 article that 17 subscription services had left the market, after a surge of these businesses in the 2010s.

Despite industrywide setback, Go seemed poised for success. In September, CEO Beauchamp told The Inquirer that the company had 1,000 subscribers in seven markets in the United States and 4,000 people on a waiting list for vehicles.

Go’s recent subscription terminations and the short return time was “shocking,” said one J.D. Power auto analyst.

“Buying a car is a long process, if you have a car, if you have a lease, you know for three years in advance when you have to get rid of that car,” said Tyson Jominy, vice president of data and analytics for the Michigan firm. “To be thrown into that market quickly and unexpectedly would be an abrupt change for most if not everyone.”

The average automobile purchase typically starts 90 days in advance, and for almost the first month the customers are still browsing and starting to get familiar with different vehicles, Jominy said.

Adding to the customers’ difficult position, they’ve been asked to deliver the vehicles to one of seven return locations or face a $400 return fee. The cars had originally been delivered to them free of charge.

One thing that led Ogden to Go were its positive reviews. The company had a 99% positive rating on Google reviews in fall 2022, Ogden said at the time.

That number has started to drop precipitously in recent weeks, following Go’s vehicle recalls. The site featured 10 one-star reviews with stories similar to Ogden’s in mid-June, and the overall rating was down to a 4.3 with 126 reviews. And then on June 26, the Google reviews vanished from online. A review aggregation site TrustIndex reported on July 4 that of 181 Google reviews, 21 are one star.

The review site TrustPilot began posting negative user stories in early June, and one-star reviews made up 38% of the 119-review total as of July 4.

Many customers are not going down without a fight.

Houston’s Somasekhar Garapati, who signed a contract with Go in February 2022, posted his own story on TrustPilot, explaining that he was taken aback by the 10-day email notice on June 5. He asked other subscribers to email him the original terms of service for their contracts. These outline a 30-day notice for contract cancellation by the consumer, but no mention of the company canceling the contract, just as he remembered, Garapati said.

“I still have the car,” Garapati said of the Nissan Sentra in an interview with The Inquirer in late June. “I told them the one and only time I talked with one of the customer service representatives, that I’m not returning the car, ‘Have your lawyer reach out to me,’ and I literally haven’t heard back since.”

Ogden said some fellow subscribers report Go has threatened to remotely shut down the vehicle. (Some dealerships have been installing remote kill switches in vehicles for years and manufacturers can access vehicles through diagnostic software.) Other subscribers told The Inquirer Go also holds the spare key to the vehicles.

Garapati said that some of the people who contacted him via TrustPilot are also exploring legal recourse against Go.

One Philadelphia-area attorney says they may have a case.

“In the industry, the traditional mechanism of the so-called bait and switch similar to these circumstances is called a ‘spot delivery,’ ” Matthew B. Weisberg of Weisberg Law wrote in an email. “It is my belief that spot deliveries are per se unlawful.”

Weisberg, president of an association of private lawyers in Philadelphia and its neighboring suburban counties called Clients First, likened it to a shady automobile dealer trick of luring customers in with a low interest rate but changing the terms after the customer signs the contract. “This new version of the old yo-yo scam appears actionable (if not a class action),” he said.

A New Jersey attorney and a current Go subscriber caught in this predicament also sees legal recourse as something worth pursuing, and that it may go right to the core of vehicle subscriptions.

“While Go calls this agreement a subscription, I think there’s a good argument to be made that it functions as a lease, and it should be treated under the law as a lease,” said Blan Jarkasi of Paterson, N.J. That reclassification would trigger the federal Truth in Lending Act and federal and state consumer protections, he said.

“I know New Jersey certainly has a ton of disclosures that need to be put into leasing documents,” Jarkasi added.

Like Ogden, Amy Druckman of Kennett Square has turned her 2022 Nissan Pathfinder in to Go. Druckman reported a difficult experience with the company throughout, including problems with her registration in the beginning and cancellation of her maintenance plan earlier this year.

When she signed up, Druckman said, her husband commented that it looked almost too good to be true. That turned out to be prescient.

“It’s just been a crap show all the way through,” Druckman said.