There are more than a dozen carpooling startups in India.
When there are so many companies around one single market, it can mean two things:
- the market is super-ripe and profitable and large that there can be many players (thriving in varying degrees), or
- no one has cracked it yet
In terms of carpooling, the latter seems to be true.
If we try to boil down, there aren’t many reasons why carpooling hasn’t worked.
- People don’t want strangers in their cars. People don’t want to travel with strangers. Saving money is almost always less important than dealing with the strangeness of a fellow traveller.
- Flexible things like time, route etc. become more rigid for everyone involved. Not many like that.
- Who pays what? How much? How?
Cabs have taken over autos in almost all the metros. But carpooling as a culture is yet to catch on. The number of attempts at cracking this market has been quite high given a very poor rate of success.
Carpool startups have to make money too. So one way they make sure this happens is by focusing on corporates. (Incidentally, security is also a reason cited for focusing on corporate market, corporate emails and corporate credentials).
When I started making this list, one blaring thing I noticed was that almost every ride-share startup’s message is: sharing a ride is fun. make a boring lonely commute entertaining again by carpooling — which I think is definitely not what people want to hear.
Intra-city or inter-city, the biggest benefit to carpooling is savings. We may well be moving into a spending-economy from our traditional savings-economy-mindset, but savings is still a big thing in our culture. And that’s the message that should help carpooling make inroads into the urban culture.
By the way, carpooling is not new. Every village, every small town has that jeep, the bullock-cart, the chakda that other commuters on the same path hitch a ride. The reason it works sans initiation is because almost no one is a stranger. The driver/owner almost always knows the others.