This startup gets someone to drive you around… in your own car

DriveU founders Rahm Shastry, Ashok Shastry, and Amulmeet Singh Chadha.

On wide roads with open landscapes, driving is a pleasure. On pothole-dotted streets swamped with competitive traffic, not so much.

Unfortunately, urban India has more of the latter. With a little under 900,000 registered vehicles in the nation’s capital, bumper-to-bumper traffic jams are the norm.

Rahm Shastry, the co-founder of on-demand driver app DriveU, doesn’t think that’s going to get better. “Trust me, we ain’t seen nothing yet,” he says. “With urban migration and infrastructure not being able to keep up, it’s only getting worse.”

There are plenty of people to blame for infrastructural woes, but Rahm’s got an entrepreneurial outlook on the problem. Within the indistinguishable flood of Ola cabs and two-wheelers and public buses, a large majority of traffic comes from people who own cars. Why not make their lives easier?

That’s essentially what DriveU does. Users indicate where and when they want a driver, place a request, and track the chauffeur’s trip until they arrive where the car is.

Drivers who sign up get health insurance – if they’re able to maintain their rating at four stars out of five.

Plenty of people already employ drivers, but they’re paid salaries, which means car owners waste money when they’re not being driven around. Drivers are also expensive, so car owners that can afford that extra cost are usually part of the upper crust.

DriveU charges US$1.50 per hour. The lowest fare you’ll ever pay is US$1.50, and time spent after the first hour is measured by minutes on a meter. There’s an extra charge if your driver is only hired for a one-way trip, because they’ll then have to find a way to get back to their starting point. That surcharge is between US$1.15 during the day and US$3.76 at night.

This week, they also released an out-station option for drivers to go out of city limits. It costs US$18 per day, or US$9 for a half-day. “If you wanted a driver before, if you wanted to go to Coorg for a weekend and lay by the river, you’d have to plan at least a day in advance,” says Rahm. “Now you can do that on demand.”

Customers can pay with cash, use mobile wallet Paytm, or payment gateway PayUBiz, which has access to most major banks.

Testy waters

Avadesh Kumar Sha, a DriveU chauffeur, drives Arshed Syed and his wife Mumtaz.

The founders are an interesting trio. Rahm was an early investor in TaxiForSure, the taxi-hailing app that Ola bought last year for US$200 million. His son Ashok Shastry worked there. The third is Amulmeet Chadha, a product and design specialist who spent years working with three diverse but successful Indian startups – mobile wallet Freecharge, bus hailing app RedBus, and Twitter-acquired missed call startup ZipDial.

Nice guys