Edmonton car-share employee drives 900 km to retrieve car a customer took to BC

EDMONTON – Most Pogo CarShare clients use the service to take care of errands in or around Edmonton. Occasionally, some people use them for road trips in different parts of the country but they are expected to return the vehicles once they’re finished with them.

But one customer recently decided to park one of Pogo’s vehicles more than 900 kilometres away from Alberta’s capital, in Vernon B.C.

“The cars are absolutely allowed to be taken outside of Edmonton – they can be taken anywhere in Canada – but they are absolutely meant to be brought back to the zone in Edmonton but that wasn’t the case this time,” Allison Harrison, Pogo CarShare’s marketing and communications manager, told Global News on Tuesday.

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Pogo said its cars have tracking hardware but in this case, it was actually a resident of Vernon who informed the company of the wayward vehicle.

Pogo got in touch with the customer, who indicated he was not planning to bring the car back anytime soon.

“They did not have an excuse or reasoning behind them taking the car to Vernon,” Harrison said. “This is the first time a car’s been left in a different province.”

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One enterprising Pogo employee went to extraordinary lengths to retrieve the vehicle.

On Thursday, someone from Pogo, posted a tweet that said, “On a road trip to BC. Some bozo left a car in Vernon.”

Danien Hilhorst, an assistant marketing manager at Pogo, offered to pick up the car and had a little fun with the unscheduled work trip, deciding to turn it into a mini-ski vacation.

“Going through my head was, ‘I’m a big skier’ and the car was in B.C. And there’s good skiing in B.C. And I wondered if maybe there was some way of combining those things together,” he said.

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Pogo said the customer who used the vehicle will now be responsible for paying for the cost of getting the car back and expects the bill to be thousands of dollars.