Stealing Away the 'Blues' of Smart Mobility BluSmart, the fully-electric ride-hailing and EV charging platform, has launched two industry-first products: zero ride-denial and zero-surge policy
By Shrabona Ghosh •
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BluSmart, the fully-electric ride-hailing and EV charging platform, currently operating in the Delhi NCR and Bengaluru region, has a differentiated supply-side model with customer-centric service. It believes owning assets is not the core skill-set of the driver-partner. "So, we lease electric cars from global leasing institutions. Drivers on the platform work flexibly without any stress of asset-ownership and thus they can stick to their core-skill set of driving and of not owning assets. This allows us to serve customers well as when the drivers are not owning cars, they cannot do any ride denials, which means overall customer service improves," said Rishabh Sood, CTO, BluSmart. .
On the customer side, it has launched two industry-first products: zero ride-denial and zero-surge policy. To embrace the new ride hailing norms with EVs, "We are solving the core issue of fuel being a constraint with EVs vs ICE vehicles. We are disrupting the traditional ride hailing industry with our full stack approach towards solving for ride matching at scale where no human is required to make decisions and the technology optimally guides the drivers right from picking up customers to reaching the nearest EV charging stations when running out of charge."
Since the launch, BluSmart has built a network of 1700-plus EV charging stations across Delhi NCR and Bengaluru saving about 8 million liters of fossil fuel. "We are also building a public EV charging infra with the Delhi government on various metro stations."
The EV industry as we know is constantly evolving. When we started we had EVs with a driving range of around 100 km and today we have EVs going as high as 500 km in our fleet. Similarly, we have seen all ranges of charger technology right from a 3.6 kW slow charger to a 60 kW CCS charger. Our technology was built starting from the lowest specs of EVs and Chargers and has evolved to incorporate the changing scenario as well as maintaining full backward compatibility.
Having seen this evolution, we always evaluate the future readiness of what we are trying to do and design our technology stack and architecture with that view.
"Our belief is that the battery and charging technology will continue to evolve further and armed with the knowledge derived from the billions of data points from the past and a high degree of flexibility in our technology, we will be able to stay in the forefront of the technology revolution that this industry is seeing.
Ride Hailing on EVs has its own complexities due to various reasons. Refueling, which is a 2 minute job for ICE vehicles can take over an hour for EVs. Further, the density and availability of charging stations is far lower as compared to fuel pumps. To top this some of the popular EVs in the market have ranges of 150-200 km, which is much lower than ICE vehicles.
"Despite the complexities, the one big advantage that EVs provide are lower running costs. BluSmart has been able to unlock and unleash this potential by building a grounds-up born electric technology stack for EVs."
