But is this really the typical rental car experience? It depends on what you mean by “typical.” It might be typical for the low-grade services that share a pickup spot with Silvercar, but it’s not really true of established vendors like Hertz and Avis, especially not at their airport locations.

I raise the question with Nick, a Silvercar Social Media Coordinator. As a Hertz Gold member, I tell him, I don’t wait in line, I don’t get upsold, and I don’t get a run-down vehicle. And on top of that, I can get that service anywhere—Reno or Cincinnati or Sacramento or Des Moines.

Nick admits that Silvercar’s service area is limited, but reports that many of their customers have abandoned premium rental memberships like Hertz Gold due to Silvercar’s excellent customer experience, a factor he bolsters by citing the company’s net promoter score. Of course, a consumer satisfaction score won’t bring a car to you in Topeka—or even in Houston or Atlanta or Chicago, for now.

More than anything, Silvercar sells a suite of exclusivities. “Use your smartphone. Rent an Audi A4. Every time,” reads its marketing. Using a smartphone to rent a car is superfluous at best, annoying at worst, but its utility is beside the point. Given the personalized drop-off service, this is technology for show, produced for rhetorical effect rather than functionality. The point is to have an app, to interact with customers by text rather than voice, to be with-it and modern. When tech startups flaunt their apps, they’re often pandering to an audience that identifies with mobile and web technology, rather than one that needs to make use of it. People don’t like Uber because they like technology; they like Uber because they like car services but hate making telephone calls.

Silvercar’s exclusivity of locations is likewise not just a vestige of a new service that hasn’t yet rolled out nationally. It’s a statement about places that are worth bothering with in the first place. San Francisco and Austin, hotbeds of tech entrepreneurship (the company is based in Austin and principally funded by Austin Ventures). LA and Dallas offer convenient second-bets, big cities in the same states, with sprawling aerotropolises sufficient to insert offices without succumbing to the ghetto of rinky-dink, small-time operators. Silvercar doesn’t want you to wait for it to open shop in its destinations, so much as it wants you to plan your destinations so that they correspond with Silvercar’s open shops. Who wants to go to Des Moines anyway? Silvercar whispers the secret Austin and San Francisco believe they have realized: all business travel is technology travel, because all business is technology.

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As it happens, Dallas-Fort Worth airport was partly designed based on a fantasy car rental experience. A 1960s Hertz television ad showed a traveler effortlessly floating from plane to car. The curved terminals of DFW, with their characteristically short distances between the gates and outdoor roadways were inspired by this effortless, unencumbered transition from air to road, the golden age of American jet travel. “Park and fly” wasn’t meant to be the logic of off-site economy garages, but the sleek, reality of daily life for the jet set. But by the early 1970s, a proliferation of hijackings had mandated passenger and baggage screening, and DFW’s architecture quickly became the bottleneck we know and hate to this day. These days at DFW, LAX, and most other airports, rental cars are housed in large, off-site facilities accessible only by shuttle bus. Such an experience contributes to the sense that car rental sucks, but in so doing it makes the experience feasible at scale.

DFW’s design may have made unspoken assumptions about a small jet set elite, but at least it was aspiring for populism rather than its dismantling. Like its techno-automotive cousins Tesla and Uber, services like Silvercar represent a shift from designing products and services to support a general population to focusing on an elite capable of wrangling, negotiating, or paying their way out of the drudgery of ordinary life. If you have the sense that Silvercar sounds great but might also be good to be true, you might be onto something.