Can Rocket Internet’s new carpooling startup hit the ground running in Taiwan?

The Rocket Internet rocket ship continues to blast onward and upward. Two weeks ago Tech in Asia wrote about Tripda, a carpooling startup that launched in Malaysia, Singapore, and the Philippines. Now, the company is soft launching in Taiwan, and co-founder Pedro Meduna tells us the team is working to enter four more markets in Asia.

When we first covered Tripda, we compared it to Ridejoy and Zimride – two US-based long distance carpooling startups that ultimately folded or pivoted to other business models. But another precedent for Tripda would be Blablacar, the carpooling startup that has enjoyed strong traction across Europe. Like Tripda, Blablacar lets car owners preparing for a trip offer seats to passengers who are headed in the same direction. The company sets a suggested price which drivers can tweak to their liking. Passengers can pay their drivers in cash or through Blablacar’s online payment services, which are only available in certain markets. Launched from Paris in 2006, the company now has seven additional offices across the continent, and recently closed a US$100 million funding round.

The success of Blablacar in Europe and the failure of Ridejoy in the US shows how transportation and sharing economy startups might thrive in one market and fizzle in others. Last year, in an excellent Gigaom piece, Blablacar founder Frederic Manzella suggested that carpooling hasn’t yet caught fire in the US due to the lower cost of car ownership there compared to Europe, and also because US cities tend to be very spread-out, making cars a long-term necessity for most.

What are the prospects for carpooling in Asia? Meduna and Crane Wang, country manager for Tripda in Taiwan, are obviously optimistic. The Tripda team has described Taiwan as a “priority market,” and hopes to target commuters, travelers, and music festival pilgrims as its customer base.

In order to roughly gauge market demand for Tripda in Taiwan, Wang and Meduna spent two weeks visiting college campuses, hostels, and travel agencies. Wang hopes that Tripda’s traction in Taiwan will start from university students, primarily because they believe young people tend to be more open to the concept of sharing a car with strangers.

On the one hand, Wang sees an opportunity for Tripda to thrive in Taiwan because most locals in their twenties and early thirties don’t own cars.

“In Malaysia, the country manager told me that the percentage of university students that own a car is about 10 to 15 percent,” he says. “In Taiwan, unscientifically, if I talk with 100 students, I’d guess only eight of them have cars.”

See: ‘Uber for logistics’ is already happening in Asia, and Uber is getting left behind

Of course, that’s a double-edged sword – if demand is off the charts, and there aren’t enough cars to share, Tripda will hit a bottleneck pretty quickly. The company also faces steep competition from Taiwan’s already robust transportation infrastructure. Its trains and buses are already quite affordable – a train ticket from Kaohsiung to Taipei will start at NT$889 (about US$30), whereas a train ticket from Paris to Luxembourg will start at upwards of €70 (about US$88).

Two-wheeled motor vehicles are also a common form of transportation among Taiwan residents of all ages. According to government statistics cited by The China Post, there are 67.6 motorcycles for every 100 people, compared to 32.4 cars for every 100 people. This could also prevent Tripda from seeing immediate traction on the island.

But trains, buses, and scooters arguably can’t compete with the comfort of a car. If Tripda hopes to see strong adoption among college students, the team will have to work hard to ensure that the few students who do own cars post listings on Tripda frequently. Wang says he’s brainstorming incentives to help make carpooling appealing in Taiwan:

“I’m still thinking about what kind of incentives we can provide drivers to make them feel that it’s cool. If you look at Lyft, those moustaches are pretty cool. Or, we can just give money to them. We have many options in mind, and we need to think of which ones are the safest. You’ll have to give us more time to figure it out.”

Given Rocket Internet’s execution-focused ethos, expect Tripda to roll out into more markets very soon, including the US. While the company hasn’t officially announced plans to expand into North America (Meduna declined to comment), Crunchbase lists two people, Adi Vaxman and Joe McFarlane, as “founders” of Tripda. LinkedIn states both work for Tripda from New York City.