Sakshi Vij (GMP 23, 2017) is the founder and CEO of Myles, an innovative car-sharing company operating in 21 cities in India. In this interview, she talks about the potential growth in the car-sharing space and how new technologies enable her to connect car owners to customers.

“We are seeing that over the next five to 10 years, almost 60 percent of the world's population will, in fact, live in cities instead of the rural areas. And that's going to put a huge burden on the infrastructure that cities will have to create.

“The way we created Myles Cars was an extremely simple platform model that allows car owners and car users to be able to connect. We brought together all the stakeholders that go into owning a vehicle and made it into a subscription product. As a car owner, because your car sitting at home was getting utilized only for 10 to 15 percent of the time, what's happening in the case of car sharing is the same car gets utilized almost about 75 to 80 percent of the time.

“We've invested in two very important aspects of our business. We invest today in telematics and internet of things as a technology to be able to get enough data from the vehicle. And, to make it transparently available to the car owner, we also rely heavily on insurance as a product. We today work with some of the largest insurance companies in the country to be able to ensure that every car user is able to pay only for the time that they're utilizing the vehicle.

“Car sharing has a very large impact on various aspects of the way economies are developed as we go forward. The number of cars that can be shared on a car-sharing network, and the number of people it can impact, really reduces the overall burden of vehicles on the roads.

“If we are able to tap into the millennials and their idea of not owning assets, and give them a product that allows them to do it in a seamless, frictionless manner, that's the success that we're trying to achieve.

“My biggest takeaway from GMP has been the idea that if we collaborate well, if we understand industries and cultures well, I think a lot of problems can be solved in the entire scheme of things in the developed as well as the developing world.”

(Published March 2019)

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