Ola hints cheapest cabs get 1 million rides a day, beats Uber in India

Delhi’s traffic. Photo credit: Wikipedia.

In India, go cheap or go home.

That seems to be the mantra for the country’s ever warring ride-hailing apps, namely Ola and Uber.

In a fresh round of jousting, Ola today claimed that its “micro” cabs – a new category that allows users to book rides for as low as 9 cents a kilometer – have single handedly managed to book more rides than Uber in its entirety in the country.

Launched about seven weeks ago, Ola Micro is now operational in 75 Indian cities, the company said. It uses small cars like the Datsun Go, and is cheaper than Uber’s cheapest category, UberGO.

“We found that there was a gap between Ola autos [rickshaws] and cabs, and consumers picked it up best. Ola Micro continues to be our fastest growing category,” Ola’s head of categories Raghuvesh Sarup told Tech in Asia.

See: Uber goes for three wheels with UberAuto in India

For those who follow the sector, Ola’s announcement is enough to raise eyebrows. Because both companies have adopted a tradition of nebulous announcements in the country, it is hard to exactly measure who is doing better and on what parameters.

Ola has a total of 350,000 cars on its India-only platform divided among various categories ranging from the Micro to the Prime. In October, it claimed to be serving a million ride requests a day.

Uber does not share ride data, but in August, industry sources told Reuters that the company was averaging about 200,000 trips a day in India, and was aiming for 1 million rides a day over the next six to nine months.

Going by those measures, Uber must be close to a million rides now, which would in turn mean that that is the kind of booking Ola Micro is completing.

An Uber spokesperson did not elaborate except to say: “We are excited to see the growth and momentum we have picked over the last few months becoming the most popular ride-hailing app in India. It’s all possible because of the product and technology that provides better value to our riders and drivers using our platform.”

Uber pressure

Photo credit: Ian D. Keating