“Connected vehicles cooperating as fleets”
The mobility market is changing fast, which is why Fleet Europe organises the annual Smart Mobility Start-up Awards. Two months after the 2018 edition in Barcelona, we had a chat with Raphael Gindrat, CEO and Co-founder of Bestmile, who won the third prize in Barcelona, to check how they are doing.
Can you describe in one to two sentences the solution offered by Bestmile?
Raphael Gindrat: “Bestmile’s technology enables connected vehicles—autonomous and human-driven—to work together as fleets. While many businesses have been focused on technology that enables vehicles to safely navigate a prescribed route, few have developed solutions that enable these vehicles to work together to efficiently deliver on-demand services.”
What is your USP (compared to other similar companies)?
“Bestmile’s Mobility Services Platform serves as kind of air traffic control for vehicles, optimising factors like dispatching, pooling, and routing to get the right vehicle to the right place at the right time, and enabling service providers to move more people with fewer vehicles.”
What is the characteristic strength of Bestmile?
“Our advanced dispatching and ride matching algorithms greatly increase fleet efficiency and performance, for example allowing a service provider to reduce the number of vehicles needed by a factor of 10 while delivering the same number of rides per day, thanks to pooling. We are also unique in our ability to support both human-driven services like ridehailing and micro-transit as well as autonomous services like robotaxis and autonomous shuttles. This means service providers can deploy human-driven services today, migrate to autonomous services in the future, and manage hybrid fleets to meet different needs in different service areas.”
What progress has Bestmile made since the Start-up Awards?
“Since the Start-up Awards we have announced that our platform is being used by a US ridehailing service (Alto) and a French micro-transit service (CTS), in addition to the autonomous fleets we already managed throughout Europe. We have also announced a new service design offering in which we use our platform to simulate and test service performance in advance of deployment to help ensure the service will meet passenger and operator requirements. This has been extremely popular with service providers because there are many unknowns associated with new mobility services, and we can help to transform some of these unknowns into predictable outcomes.”
Have you established interesting partnership or contacts or experiences at the Fleet Europe Summit?
“The Fleet Europe Summit presented Bestmile with the opportunity to meet many potential partners and customers and we have started discussions with some, but there is nothing that we can disclose at this time.”
What are Bestmile’s plans for the near future?
“We are building relationships with automotive OEMs, taxi companies, transportation network companies (TNCs), and public transit agencies to continue to build our business and to help them to deliver exciting new mobility services.”
Image: picture of Bestmile CEO Raphael Gindrat.
