Drive mate - Share & Rent Cars

Dreadful service - cars are advertised to be booked that are not actually available, with no support in organising a refund. Do not recommend using.

Two terrible experiences. First booking attempt - no car was there to pick up, taking Drive mate over 4hrs to resolve, ruining my plans. Second attempt, they had the wrong drop off address, impacting me and the owner. Bring back Uber Carshare!

I have used car sharing quite extensively. The car and experience with the car owner was really easy and totally pleasant, however when the app glitched and wouldn’t allow me to check the car back in on time, that was the beginning of a horrible technical and customer relation experience! The km fees were due at $22.50 - Drive Mate were attempting to charge an additional $450 to my card! Now still, 10 days later I have no resolution and no return of the $50 refundable deposit despite creating 8-10 tickets in Drive Mate’s system, multiple phone calls and screen shots of all interactions. Why would you when other apps out there are a breeze? Unfortunate for the car owners that technically have hey just can’t get it together. 5 lemons 🍋🍋🍋🍋🍋

Drive mate were hard to get a hold of,and then charged me wrong-sorry drive mate you failed

Do not download this app or rent a car from them. The company seems unreliable and lacks proper security on their website and app. Worst of all, you’ll never get your bond back! I booked a car and canceled it immediately, yet it’s been 1.5 months, and I’m still waiting for my refund. Despite emailing and messaging them multiple times, their responses are either unhelpful or generic, like: “Hello, thank you for reaching out! This is Amber. I’ll be glad to check this out for you. Please bear with me 😊.” After that, they go silent. Absolutely unacceptable service. Avoid this app!

I used Drivemate twice and had to contact customer service on both occasion. First time, I could not lock the vehicle at return as the app would just end the trip after taking the photos. The vehicle also did not have physical locks so locking it manually was not an option. 2nd time, the app would not let me save the photos. It added over a hour in the pick up and return process. The customer service is also quite difficult to reach and requires constant calling until someone finally picks up. From the reviews before me, it looks like I am not the only ones who had trouble so the customer service is probably super busy sorting out all the app issues. I doubt that I will use Drivemate again and will probably give Turo a try next time that I require a vehicle.

A bit fiddly using the app with uploading pics and pick up/drop off.. but it’s ok once figured it out

** UPDATE: they’ve offered me $20 for the inconvenience of having to wait 13 hours for the verification process, 8 days for a response on this issue and not to mention the app failing which didn’t let me extend the van booking. Then I was charged an inconvenience fee of $120 for being 30 minutes late 🤔 this company is a SCAM and I deserve that “inconvenience fee” returned back for the inconvenience I had to face during this horrendous experience.** Horrible experience—still waiting for a refund after 8 days. Every time I call or message, I’m given the runaround with promises of a response within an hour, a few hours, or up to 48 hours—and still nothing. Verifying my ID was supposed to take 3 hours but ended up taking over 13 hours and 6 phone calls. I needed to book a van to move house early the next morning, only to hear back close to midnight. I started the verification process around 9am. The poor service made moving house incredibly stressful. When I went to pick up the van, the app didn’t work properly and wouldn’t let me complete the pick up process. Later, I couldn’t extend the booking time because the pick up process didn’t work. The app claimed $8 per hour, but I was charged $120 for being just 30 minutes late—this extra charge was never disclosed, and I expected to pay for just another hour. Reaching customer service has been impossible. After 10+ calls and 8 days of waiting, I’m still getting nowhere—all while trying to manage a house move. I would not recommend this service to anyone; there are far better options available. This company is clearly understaffed and incapable of handling their workload or offer solutions. If I could give a 0-star review, I would.

So handy, we had to move a massage chair and the straps and size of the Ute was great

The app itself has improved from the time I’ve been using Drivemate. At first I experienced a lot of issues like not being able to take photos of car at night as the camera feature in app to upload photos did not have a flash, this has since been fixed, you also could not lock up cars at the end of your hire period that had keyless entry so you were forced to either leave car as is, or do the responsible thing and contact customer support to remotely lock car on your behalf as this step was missing at first from the return process (this has since been fixed). Sometimes you cannot book a car via their app and have to use a web browser to access drivemate website as booking errors exist within app which prevent you from booking a car. They also use to ask drivers to return car to the same fuel level you found car in. However, this was inconvenient because cars were not always returned with sufficient fuel so if you kept following this silly rule you might continue hiring a car that had been returned with minimal fuel so you’re only option was to refuel car sufficiently before your trip but no fuel reimbursements existed back then so you’d spend money on fuel not only for your trip but the next drivers too. Drivemate have since changed their fuel policy to mirror what Uber Carshare use to do which was to charge fuel per km which is more user friendly and if you do need to fuel up the car the fuel cost ‘should’ be reimbursed upon uploading the fuel receipt. *** Please note I’m yet to receive this fuel reimbursement for 2 trips I made back in December and when trying to follow this up with Drivemate they do not provide an eta for this reimbursement, only telling you the ‘ticket’ will be picked up on soon so it can be lodged. It’s been over a week now since my last trip and closer to 2 weeks for the previous trip so if they cannot reimburse fuel costs in a timely manner this makes me hesitant to book another car because even though the hire process is quite easy now, what’s the point in hiring a car if you have a backlog of fuel costs that may or may not be reimbursed? Customer service is also very slow and now that the platform is growing. Back in November/early December you could get through to customer support within let’s say 10 minutes maximum, now you’d be lucky to get a response within this time frame. Sometimes I’ve waited half a day or had someone tell me they were looking at my issue and would be back in a moment, that ‘moment’ literally turned i