Customer story
Earth Rides launches a new earth-friendly ride sharing service
Goal
Become an established player in the ride sharing market by leveraging a zero-emission fleet to offer superior rider and driver experiences.
Overview
Earth Rides is a ride sharing start-up based in Nashville that uses its own fleet of zero-emission electric vehicles (EVs), currently Teslas, to provide service, a pillar of its business model. Unlike with many of its competitors, Earth Rides drivers are employees, not independent contractors.
As such, its focus is on delivering a safe and premium experience for them and for riders. Though currently operating in its hometown only, Earth Rides is planning to expand to new markets and therefore requires a back-end that can easily support this growth.
- Partner
- Earth Rides
- Location
- Nashville, TN
- Launch
- September 2020
- SERVICE TYPE
- Ride sharing
Challenges
- Earth Rides first launched in early 2020 with a proprietary back-end management software solution but required a more stable system that would permit it to scale;
- Launching during a pandemic, Earth Rides needed to be extra vigilant to keep its drivers and riders safe;
- Using a 100% EV-fleet, Earth Rides needs to make sure it’s able to adequately monitor, predict and schedule charging breaks for its vehicles to have enough capacity to meet demand;
- The company had to find a way to deliver on its premium service promise while keeping prices in line with the competition.
Solution
Earth Rides turned to Spare’s on-demand mobility platform to improve operational efficiency, manage its electric fleet and help it smoothly scale. On the back-end, the company has access to a slew of reporting tools that allow it to rapidly prototype and iterate its service, as well as manage its zero-emission operations by automatically scheduling driver duties.
On the front-end, drivers are equipped with their own app that easily allows them to track their assigned trips. With a whitelabel rider app from Spare, passengers book their trips from their smartphone and their request is automatically matched to an available vehicle. To ensure top efficiency, Earth uses Spare’s ride-on-ride functionality, which means it can assign a trip to a driver based on routing before their current one is done.
Spare also supports Earth Rides with streamlined pick-ups (the ability to pick-up at predetermined locations on popular routes); scheduled trips for advance bookings, which means passengers wait less; and in-app driver tipping.
“Our mission is to make being healthy cool by bringing Earth to Tennessee, I hope to expose electric vehicles to a whole new audience and create a healthier environment for us all.”
Results
In the first quarter of 2021, Earth Rides has seen significant month over month growth with revenue, unique riders and the number of boardings per hour all increasing. More than half of all trips were scheduled in advance through their app and the median travel time was eight minutes.
Earth Rides is using ride-on-ride to lower operations costs. This allows the company to dispatch the most efficient vehicle to collect a rider even if it is marked as ‘in service’.
According to in-app feedback and reviews in the Apple and Google Play stores, riders are enthusiastic about the service calling it “Superior to all ride sharing apps”.
Thanks to its success in Nashville, Earth Rides is expanding to Austin, TX in the summer of 2021, with plans to enter the Miami, Los Angeles and Atlanta markets in the near future.
- Ownership
- Female
- Fleet
- Tesla Electric Vehicles
- Average app rating
- 4.8