Car Pooling is one are where lot of startups have tried to create product but none of them have really worked.. As an Idea, it definitely looks very promising and one which has great potential..

A car pooling marketplace would ideally create a marketplace where car-poolers can instantly look for available cars for pooling and take a ride. For the marketplace to work effectively, the car pool supply has to be scale up very rapidly so that availability to the last mile (where the rider) wants to ride the car.  That is a like a chasm which none of the startups have been able to cross.  Culture might be another issue as highlighted in  this article, but I think it is more to do with scarcity of supply to the last mile.

Let us look at the practical difficulty which I think is quite detrimental for the supply to bulge. A car owner would typically need to go out of his regular route in order to pick / drop the rider – Who likes it when you are late from the office and are facing huge traffic.

Pooling of resources in public transport like Taxi, Auto or even chartered buses on the other hand can work in India.

1. Autos ply everywhere in India ( sans Gurgaon).  So last mile is not an issue. It is much easier to find another rider who is going the same way

2. Even if auto/taxi has to take a detour to pick/drop anybody – Taxi guy earns for that, Riders save money… so everybody gains..

3. People who own car in India – are not looking at earning money through car pool. For them  it is a platform where they can share and in return be carried by another car pooler sometime. Now that is difficult as the rules of the marketplace are not between a supplier and a vendor, but are more around sharing and benefiting..

On the other hand, people who are riding the auto/taxi are looking to save money and doing that they also help the economy/environment save fuel…

Some of the interesting startups in this space

GetJugaad.com, Taxi.to ,Sharedcab , Smart Mumbaikar, NTL Shared Taxi