India holds the title for the only country in the world to have two cities In the top 10 worst traffic on the ‘Tomtom’s Traffic Index’ 1, with Bangalore having the second highest and Pune (surprisingly) ranking at number six. Another source, www.trafficindex.org, that uses screenshots of cities taken every 20 minutes on Google Maps, and then measures the amount of each colour shown, Indicates that New Delhi, Mumbai, Bangalore have the worst traffic in India.
No matter what list one looks at, the fact remains, that traffic across the country is bad, and as India hits record car sales quarter-on-quarter, It’s only bound to get worse. With ever-increasing traffic, many car owners have sought an alternative to driving themselves or taking taxis- hiring on-demand drivers.
While hiring full-time drivers is an unwanted costly monthly expenditure for most, a host of new-age companies now make It easy to hire drivers fractionally. For example, say you and your family want to go out for a day of shopping and running errands, but you don’t want to deal with driving through traffic or searching for parking, you can hire a driver for just that shopping trip for however many hours you’d like. Now you must be thinking that hiring a driver wouldn’t be an economical alternative, but when we crunch the numbers, it actually saves a car owner 30% on transportation costs.
Popular app-based taxi providers charge approximately Rs 1,200 for 4 hours and 40 kilometres for the cheapest hatchback option. If you choose to hire a driver, it’ll cost you about Rs 450 for 4 hours, and let’s say another Rs 400 on fuel if your car gets 10 kilometres per litre, so a total of Rs 850, immediately saving a car owner Rs 350 for a day out. The sharp-minded and astute will point out that a car owner is also paying their monthly EMI, annual
maintenance and insurance which will drive up the cost, and they’re not wrong. However, we have to take into consideration that regardless of the vehicle’s usage, the car owner will still bear those costs.
Now that the high-cost myth is busted, let’s focus on other reasons people hire drivers- convenience and productivity. Priya is aBangalore-based mother,
small business owner and manages her household. Her schedule is erratic at best, and absolutely chaotic at worst- make breakfast, get the kid ready, drop the kid to school, visit a client, buy groceries, respond to emails, pick up the kid from school… you get it. She’s a very, very busy woman and spending 260 hours in rush hour traffic per year behind the wheel is not helping. Hiring a driver to drive her car, that has all her personal effects and creature comforts inside, frees up underutilised hours and allows her to be the super woman she is.
Employing a full-time driver is very useful for some people, but most people don’t need a driver 12 hours a day, 6 days a week. Let’s take Krishna and Sonam for an example, both recently retired and living a simple life in Mumbai. Three days a week they go to their locality’s club to catch up with their friends, and the other days they enjoy being at their home with family. With Mumbai’s infamous and disorderly traffic, driving isn’t something that they look forward to doing and hiring a full-time driver isn’t required for the occasional trips, so hiring fractionally through a trusted platform is what they opt-in for.
At the end of the day, hiring drivers on a part-time basis has proven to be the preferred method of transportation for many due to economics and for the comfort and convenience of using one’s own car. As the knowledge of such services’ existence spreads, the market potential and opportunity for these companies increases dramatically, and who knows, we might just see another “war” between two rivals like we saw in the mid-teens with Uber and Ola.
