Myles, India’s first self-drive service was founded by Ms. Sakshi Vij in 2013. The company is steadily changing the way the Indian consumers approach car ownership by delivering greater flexibility, convenience and lower financial burden through the most tailored self-drive automobile solutions. Myles is currently present in more than 250 locations in 21 cities and operating with a fleet of over 1200+ cars. The company also has a comprehensive global footprint with operations in 145 countries through strategic partnerships with international service providers such as autoeurope and rentalcars.com.
Sujata Sangwan Interacts With Sakshi Vij, Founder, Myles And Spoke To Her
1. What are the recent trends in self-drive car rentals in India? A new culture in urban mobility is needed in order to deliver integrated and sustainable transport planning; the challenge is to find appropriate strategies that provide effective alternatives to entice drivers, passengers and pedestrians to adopt more responsible mobility. Technology will play a crucial role in this transformation and will give the much necessary impetus to the growth of the industry. From the demand side the personal ground transportation segment will witness disruption and there will be a likely change in mind-set with users adopting car sharing models against ownership. Self-drive is the next engine of growth for travel in India.
The origin of Myles also happened because we realized that owning a car was becoming more and more expensive and the time that the car spent just parked in our garages and parking lots was increasing. This led us to create a proposition where people could have access to any car they have without buying it. The next opportunity/ challenge for us to work with regulators to introduce smarter car sharing systems which lead to decongest ion and better parking infrastructure in the country. In the given macro business scenario, the increasing demand and the lighter business model we are ready to grow manifolds.
2. What led to the inception of Myles? Explain the problem statement you observed in the market here and your solution for it. I saw a huge opportunity in the transportation industry. This opportunity was much larger than the opportunity in the Taxi industry that was being disrupted by multiple players across the world. This was an opportunity to disrupt the personal car ownership market. According to the Cars Online survey conducted by Capgemini in 2014 across 10000 respondents around the globe, it was observed that 59% Indians looking to buy a car were open to the idea of an alternative mode of ownership. This was primarily because of the need of greater Flexibility, convenience and lower financial burden. The average usage of a car in a year is less than 150 days. Over 200 days a year a personal car sits in your garage depreciating in value and appreciating in cost owing to the maintenance and parking requirements. With this understanding, Myles was born.
We started Myles after I had studied the growth of Car sharing and Self drive services and technology enablers in the global landscape. While the initial idea was to start with a few cars and test the market, we received early success. We started with 14 cars and 3 cities in November 2013. We were sold out for the next 1 month in the first five days of our putting those cars on our platform.
This proved the fact that the time was finally right for Self drive rentals to grow in India. There was in fact a latent demand from travelers in India, who would love to explore Indian roads, but didn’t really think it was possible to find a Self drive rental in the country.
3. Who are your competitors and how do you stand out among them? The Self Drive industry is in the growth phase in India. This has encouraged many regional and multicity players to emerge. We are however a unique Asset light model trying to develop and Alternate ecosystem to can ownership.
4. What is the customer profile that rents cars from Myles? What is the age-group of the customers and what purposes they rent car for?
Myles is a product for the young urban professionals who hate to commit to assets they can have access to. Myles is most popular among Males/Females, in the age group of 24- 40, living in urban Indian cities.
Today we have a community of over 1.5 lakh Mylers registered with us. These are individuals who have ditched there personal cars for a more cost effective, flexible and convenient solution. The use cases vary from a housewife who takes our car for 2 hours every afternoon and does her daily shopping trip to a passionate traveler who wanted to drive from Delhi to Kanyakumari and therefore used a Myles car. We also cater to a large number of business travelers, NRIs, Foreign Tourists amongst others.
5. How do you see the trend in the future? With the growing individualism and my space phenomena, self-drive will be leading most of the ground transportation travel. The next 10 years are going to see a lot of traction and movement in the ground transportation industry. My belief is that the next decade will redefine car rental industry in India with huge growth of self-drive segment and easy availability of on-demand services across 100 cities in India. The industry will see major investments from PE players, automotive industry and global car rental brands.
What started in Delhi, Mumbai and Bengaluru has attracted interest in Tier-2 cities like Jaipur, Coimbatore, Udaipur, Pune, Mysore and more. The positive response has encouraged us to expand the operations to smaller cities and new markets.
6. How has the response been so far?We are recording 30-40% growth month on month, measuring to a phenomenal growth of over 1100% in the last 12 months. Myles cars have driven over a Million “Myles” already. In the last few months, we've seen a surge in demand from the Tier-2 cities as well.
With a few clicks on the Mobile one can now drive away with a car of their choice for a price as low as Rs. 50/hr. This being a fraction of the cost of actually owning a car across categories, we see the product changing the car usage patterns of the young urban populations.
7. How open is the Indian commuter to the option of self-driving a rented car?
According to the Cars Online survey conducted by Capgemini in 2014 across 10000 respondents around the globe, it was observed that 59% Indians looking to buy a car were open to the idea of an alternative mode of ownership. This was primarily because of the need of greater Flexibility, convenience and lower financial burden. The average usage of a car in a year is less than 150
days. Over 200 days a year a personal car sits in your garage depreciating in value and appreciating in cost owing to the maintenance and parking requirements.
It has been established that weekend gateways, short trips and vacations are increasingly getting popular. A young professional drives drives to work in his sedan, but may want a 4-wheel drive for adventure holidays. Myles gives you the liberty and flexibility to choose from the 38 car models depending the the occasion, mood and requirement. Therefore, the Indian commuter has embraced the idea of renting a self-drive car.
8. What are your future plans?Tier-1 cities like Delhi-NCR, Bangalore, Bombay and Chennai have shown remarkable growth in the recent years. The positive response has encouraged us to expand the operations to smaller cities and new markets.
In the next 4 years we would like to bring together a fleet of 50000 cars in 50 cities spread across over 5000 locations. We want to provide a Myles car every 400 meters in a city. We are currently a community of 150,000 Mylers, we hope to get around 5 million members in the next five years.
9. Please explain the process while renting out a car? We have a very simple and easy process while renting out cars to our customers. The minimum age required to rent a Myles is 23 years. Also, our customer needs to show the original Passport/Voters ID card/ Aadhar card, a valid Drivers License & a credit card with sufficient balance for standing instructions. The security deposit for most of our cars in priced at INR 5000.
10. Please explain your exact business model, and all your value offerings. How did you go about addressing the opportunity, what were some strategies you developed?Myles is trying to develop an Alternate Ecosystem to Car Ownership. On an average a personal car owned in a Household gets driven for only 20-25% of the 365 days that it is available. We are trying to meet this exact inefficiency in the system which is adding to the road, parking and economic burden on the infrastructure available in cities today. Globally, a Self Drive car has the potential to be shared between up to 20-25 individuals hence reducing the needs of so many cars being added into the cities.
On the consumer side, we are providing an option for individuals to be able to pay for a car only for the duration for which they use it. So you could buy a car for as little as 2 hours or as long as 3 months. Additionally, we know that owning a car means a commitment to a single vehicle for atleast a 3 years period in your city of residence. We provide over 39 models of cars across 21 cities in India. So as a consumer, there is flexibility to drive a Mercedes for date night, a Fortuner for a Roadtrip and a Maruti Swift for the everyday trips. Services such as GPS Systems, Child Seats and Home Delivery of a car ensure that the system is extremely convenient for the consumer.
To tackle the supply issue, we work with fleet operators, car manufacturers and car dealers to enable fleets to be available in the ecosystem which can be utilized for atleast 65-70% on the time to ensure greater movement and hence greater monetisation.
11. How will you monetise value, do you have a multi-dimensional revenue model?Myles focuses on being a Technology platform that connects the Car owner(Fleet Operator in our case) with a car user. We connect the two and ensure a seamless experience for the two. The fact that the car owner can utilize a car upto 65-70% of the time ensures that they can monetize this asset significantly more than a personal car. We make money on the greater utilization of this inventory as well.
12. What have been the toughest challenges you've faced so far?Our Biggest challenge has been our Biggest success as well. We are trying to encourage people to give up the need to buy a car. This means that every customer who we approach has to make a huge lifestyle change of not having a car standing at their doorstep all the time. However, we tackle it through delivering Convenience, Affordability and Flexibility in the Self drive rental experience.
13. Have you raised funding? what do the investors bring to the table other than cash? We have been invested by Carzonrent. They help us strategically as well as monetarily because of the huge network, brand value and domain knowledge that they have in the transportation space in India and Globally.
14. What kind of traction, users, monthly transactions, monthly revenues, growth rate have you seen so far. Any growth hacks?Over the last 1 year we have grown 11 times. 70% of our growth every month comes from new users. We are today a community of over 1.5 lakh Mylers. We grow at about 30% Month on Month. Our biggest growth hack has been the flexibility of our product. The fact that a customer needs to spend only Rs. 100 to try a Myles car for 2 hours makes the initiation to Self Drive that much more quicker.
