This mobility firm COO says EV bikes are not fit to ferry passengers

Rafiq Malik is the chief operating officer of Pakistan’s leading bike-taxi platform Bykea.

When Karachi-based Bykea launched in 2016, the bike-taxi model was a whole new concept for Pakistan. Today, the company has 60,000 drivers , with more than 1.7 million monthly active users on its app. Affordability has played a critical role in popularizing bike-taxis as a mode of transportation in the country, according to Rafiq Malik , Bykea’s chief operating officer. He said that while e-scooters are useful for making deliveries, they are not apt to ferry passengers.?

This interview has been edited for clarity and brevity.

How challenging was it to get Pakistan to adopt bike-taxis?

When we came to the scene in 2016, cars were the prevalent option for taxis. But cars are expensive in Pakistan. So, we didn’t need to discount bike-taxis because the prices were already 70% lower than cabs. The economics propelled the bike-taxi model forward. Everybody just figured out that a bike is cheaper and faster.

Women in South Asia are generally hesitant to use bike-taxis due to safety concerns. How have you approached this issue??

That was a factor for us while moving into the three-wheeler category. In Pakistan, the preferred mode of public transportation for women is the three-wheelers. We’ve also rolled out cars recently.

Three-wheeler drivers, we found, were running monthly subscriptions with customers — they would get paid monthly to pick up the daughter of the family from school every weekday. We wondered how to bring this model to an on-demand platform. So, we’re offering a monthly pickup package, which allows pooling with another female passenger to bring the price down.

Bykea tried out electric two-wheelers for ride-hailing but didn’t launch a fleet on the platform. Why is that?

Pakistan’s ecosystem is very nascent. If an EV stops working on the road, it needs to go back to the manufacturer because the local mechanics cannot fix it.

Also, EV scooters need to be charged multiple times a day. When you add the weight of the passenger and the speed, it kills the range of the battery. So while a delivery driver can manage 15–20 deliveries on a single charge, an EV bike-taxi driver can only do 4–5. These assets are also four times the cost of an internal combustion engine bike.

If the tech is glitchy and it doesn’t work, then our business suffers. Then we can’t be expected to adopt those EVs.

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