Homegrown cab service targets Kovai, Tiruchy for expansion

Fazil Badrudeen, Head of Brand Marketing, UTOO Cabs Ltd tells us, “We had kicked off operations in Chennai in June last year, followed by Hyderabad in October and Bengaluru in January this year. Our current fleet strength is about 1,000 vehicles in total, with 500 operational in Chennai and 250 each in the other two cities.” 

“Unlike other aggregators, we are a full-fledged taxi operator, which means we completely own our fleet of vehicles. Our USP is that we do not employ surge charges or peak pricing at any point of time in the day. And we were also keen on catering to both users of smartphones and feature phones, which is why we have both a telephone and app based platform.”

Former Aircel promoter C Sivasankaran is the driving force behind this start-up. The management is eyeing growth in a phased manner. Fazil says, “We will be focussing more on regional cities. We hope to take the brand to another eight cities before the end of the year. Coimbatore and Tiruchy are cities we are keen on entering soon. We won’t focus on major metros. Delhi has not yet framed its taxi aggregator rules. Maharashtra is framing its rules and awaiting approval. So we will be targeting cities like Mysore, Vizag, Jaipur and Pune.” 

“The reason we stick to the ‘own car’ model is to ensure the quality remains the same. We will be doing ‘driver-partner’ attachments later. We have strict norms i.e. the cars cannot be more than 1.5 years old, the vehicles need to have air bags, and drivers need a minimum of 10year experience. We are aware of issues that cropped up with drivers attached to various services. Face to face interviews and physical address verifications precede the onboarding of any driver.”