Rapido partners Zypp Electric for electric bike taxi service

Rapido, a bike taxi platform has announced partnering Zypp Electric, to provide electric bike taxi ride service – Rapido EV - to its customers. The idea is to reduce carbon footprint and encourage its customers to use environment-friendly vehicles. Rapido will also induct over 100 riders and electric two-wheelers from Zypp as part of its captain fleet.

The three-month pilot has been started in March and will be tested for its demand and veracity in the Delhi-NCR area. Rapido is also looking to on-board more EV partners to further expand this business model across its Tier I market in the country.

Announcing the launch of Rapido EV, Aravind Sanka, co-founder, Rapido said, “While India is the largest two-wheeler market, only 1% of it is electric. With the launch of Rapido EV rides, we want to give a unique experience to our users along with contributing positively to the environment and reduce our carbon footprint. The recent World Air Quality report by Swiss technology company IQAir ranked Delhi as the world’s most polluted Capital among 106 countries and we hope that this move helps contribute to the betterment of the air quality in the city.”

Akash Gupta, co-founder, Zypp Electric said, “We at Zypp are becoming the de-facto EV layer when it comes to goods and people movement. The partnership with Rapido is part of highly focused EV utilisation project where we wish to ensure that every segment is able to switch to EVs comfortably. With our robust battery swapping network which will be tested with bike taxi services with Rapido, we’re here to bolster the EV proposition together with this partnership and would love to scale this nationally making people get pollution free taxi rides too.”

The electric bike taxi will be available under the Ride section on the Rapido app and will be priced with a minimal convenience fee.

Last year, Rapido announced several initiatives towards maintaining safety and following guidelines to protect the customer and the Captain (driver/rider), including the safety back shields for bike taxi rides. The captains are expected to sanitise and clean the vehicle and all customer accessible areas, post every ride, along with mandatory usage of masks during the entire ride by the Captains and the passengers. The company also introduced new policy support last year, where the company provides free cancellation if Captains or customers are without a mask.