Many things have come to our lives thanking to the Internet: we all enjoy now instant connectivity, automation of recurring or repeating actions, and, most importantly, we have a virtually unlimited knowledge base on hands. If you are already putting your hands up willing to ask how it relates to the subject of this post, don’t worry – the answer will follow shortly.
So, connectivity, access to the information, and the Internet services have enabled another service we all know as drive sharing, ridesharing, carpooling or alike. If you want to get a mouth-drawing description of this thing, welcome to Wikipedia. And we will tell you how we see it.
Ridesharing is a service connecting those people who want to share their cars for a payment with people who need a ride to some location or, in some cases, want to drive a car. In simple words, you offer your car or yourself as a driver by means of the ride sharing service, and people who need to get to somewhere may buy an opportunity to drive your car or use you as a driver with the car.
If you need examples, look at Uber, Lyft or Gett. These are the 3 whales the ridesharing is resting on.
Another application of drive or carsharing is sharing vintage cars with those who are dreaming about the opportunity to jump in a WW2-dated Willis or drive a Ferrari Testarossa or a ‘83 Delorean… Beautiful cars shouldn’t sit calm in their stalls, they have to bring satisfaction and entertainment…
In order to let the service work properly you need GPS connectivity and navigation, smartphone (or several) and sort of a social network. The service is built into a smartphone or mobile app, and the only thing left to do is launch this app, click some buttons and get your ride or drive. Good application is a half of the ridesharing business success, as it is free of unneeded actions and displays all data in a clean and intuitive manner. So, if you want to launch your own ridesharing business, make sure to choose proper developers to build your app.
Well, back to some insights into the ridesharing industry. Although the conventional taxi industry has been sort of shaken by ridesharing companies due to much better convenience of the service use, lower pricing (at least at the beginning of the operation), and use of the latest technologies, it is still seen controversial. Old-fashioned taxi businesses file court claims against ridesharing firms as they don’t want to lose the market. Another concern is insufficient or fully missing regulation of the industry. Authorities don’t yet understand how to treat and control such domain and its representatives. And, finally, conventional taxi businesses oppose that ridesharing poses security and safety risks, as it seems to be not that simple to bring your rider or ride sharer to responsibility.
Despite of uneasy and uncalm times the newcomer is living through, the industry develops and enters more and more markets across the globe, making our life more convenient and, respectively, making us more connected.
