PickRide Hopes to Hook-Up Urban Chinese With Carpool Rides

PickRide, with its apps for Android and iPhone, allows people to carpool in order to save money and find a convenient ride as an alternative to public transport. It’s also quite a rare example of a Chinese online-to-offline service (O2O) having an overseas success.

In fact, PickRide and its founders originate from Hangzhou in eastern China, but its app and service have an English localisation and they work throughout the US (except California, for some reason). Now, though, the start-up seems ready to focus more on its home market, and has set up dedicated local servers in recent weeks in order to make the apps faster to use in China.

To coincide with this, a new update for the separate Chinese version of the mobile apps brings greater communication between potential carpoolers, and some other features that the start-up team felt that Chinese urban types would need.

There are safety systems built into the service, such as profiles, pictures, a star-based ratings system (pictured above), and a “Call4Ride” rule that establishes the identity of a rider/driver before agreeing to connect. That means a potential carpool can be cancelled by either party if you just don’t get a good feeling about a potential road-mate.

Come Ride With Me…

But PickRide still works pretty much the same in China as it does in the US – if you need a ride, you can browse spare car seats and their destinations in your neighborhood; and if you own a car, you can set out your itinerary and hopefully pick up some paying passengers to help with those sky-rocketing gas prices. I can see this taking off in Beijing, where new regulations to reduce traffic mean that you can’t even get a registration plate for a vehicle without going through a lottery system. That leaves a lot of people who can afford a car not actually able to put one on the road. Oh, and the public transportation there is insanely overloaded.

In just the past two weeks, we’ve written of two car-related start-ups in China – but both those are very different. Duducars is for renting vehicles on-the-fly that you can drive away, while Yongche is for booking limos and unofficial taxis. Only PickRide is aimed at urban carpooling.

Check out the PickRide homepage, or download the iPhone app (in English or Chinese) or the Android version (English language or Chinese) to give it a try.

[Source: TouMingTi – article in Chinese]