P2P sharing service Ruli – a pilot in Moscow

06.05.2021

Hello everybody, this is Maksim Liksutov!

We are opining registration for the first 100 participants who will test our new project called Ruli, or Drive! in English. This is a private vehicle sharing service — with its help you can rent your car to your friends and acquaintances and earn money.

Why to friends and acquaintances? Nowadays most people perceive their cars as a private space. Very few people are ready to let a stranger drive their car, so on the first stage you yourself will be able to choose whom to trust with your car from a range of your ambit of acquaintances. Moreover, we do not expect to have millions of subscribers from the very beginning, this project is a useful option that Moscow would like to provide being the one of the most innovative cities in Europe. Similar mobility solutions may also be provided by private companies, we would welcome them and are ready to assist to all parties interested.

Today everyone can easily choose services based on personal preferences. For example, while traveling ones prefer to book a hotel, others — an apartment, while some prefer to stay at their acquaintances’ place. The same situation is with cars — some people prefer to take a friend’s car than to use a car-rental service.

This is how it works: you download the mobile application Ruli and log in there. When you don’t need your car, you post a status update with your conditions. Then you mark people from your contact list. They will receive a notification and will be able to submit a request for registration in the application as a renter.

All conditions are discussed online — where to get the car, where to leave it, how long the rent will last, whether the fuel tank should be left full, whether the car should be washed, and what is the price.

Our role in this project: we have created a useful platform to simplify the renting process while being ready to improve our solution basing on your feedback. The owner of the vehicle will know everything about the car in real time — where it is, what the speed is and the remaining fuel. To do so, we will install needed telematics equipment and remote-control modules to the first 100 participants for free.

An important matter is insurance. The first 100 participants will also receive unlimited third-party liability insurance to the number of drivers for the piloting period. However, according to the third-party liability insurance policy, damage is compensated only when the other car’s driver is responsible for the road accident. Thus, we suggest choosing properly the renter among your friends and acquaintances, or to subscribe to the fully comprehensive insurance independently. The fully comprehensive insurance will cover all the expenses if the driver of your car is responsible for a car accident. In the future we plan to introduce a feature allowing to subscribe to a fully comprehensive insurance in the application.

Fines are to be paid by the driver of the car. Date when the road rule violation occurred is always fixed, so it won’t be complicated to learn who was driving the car at that time.

Our goal is to reduce reasonably the number of cars in the city, which are stored without use at parking. The Ruli service will help in achieving the goal. One personal vehicle may be used by several families living in the same building. Or by colleagues and friends working at the same office.

Even though the project is innovative, it has already proved itself. In the USA a similar service Turo has been operating for several years already. There it is possible to rent a car basing on personal preferences and cost, agree on a convenient place and time to pick up the car.

Based on the comments of the first 100 participants we will be able to improve the application and make our city solution the most convenient and popular — a service people can rely on.

By the way, another news is — the service is launched alongside in Saint-Petersburg. It will operate on our platform. With our colleagues from the Government of Saint-Petersburg we have studied the joint solution. We hope that the service will be useful for residents of both cities.