Ufodrive's Aidan McClean discusses:
- Developing a deskless rental process
- Allaying common charging concerns
- Targeting companies with carbon commitments
Founded in 2018, Luxembourg-based rental car provider Ufodrive, which has an all-electric-vehicle fleet, launched in the U.S. last year. With 40 locations throughout the world, including 16 in the U.S.—with Brooklyn and San Antonio launched in June—the company plans further expansion. BTN senior editor Donna M. Airoldi in late June spoke with Ufodrive CEO Aidan McClean about rental car pain points, the company's plans for corporate business and its future. Edited excerpts follow.
BTN: Why did you start the company?
Aidan McClean: I was working at insurance companies and doing a huge amount of business travel, probably renting 20 to 30 times a year. I got sick of the experience. It's terrible all over the world. I couldn't understand why [we had] this antiquated business model and antiquated customer experience. How could you fix it?
I came up with the idea to have an app-driven, only two-minutes-to-arrive-and-drive process. No human interactions, simple, easy, fast. And most important of all, I wanted to find a way to transition it to electric cars. I'm passionate about climate and EV tech, and the two came together. EV, digital rental, that's the answer, and that's what we did. Still to this day, though other companies rent electric cars, no one else is doing it the way we do with complete automation.
BTN: Tell me how Ufodrive operates and what makes it different from other car rental companies.
McClean: Everything is different. When the business started, we wanted to a make the customer experience second to none. We looked at the top 10 pain points, from waiting in line, paperwork, insurance, not finding the car you want, being pushed insurance you didn't need or fuel options you didn't want—everything that people hate about car rentals today. We wanted to fix all of that, so we completely eliminated all of those and solved all of those via technology.
So Ufodrive is a tech company that rents cars—electric cars only. It is an arrive-and-drive process in two minutes using your smartphone. There is no queuing, no paperwork. You don't need anybody. Your key is your phone. We give full charging support and range and management to customers once they drive away. We handhold customers through the entire experience of renting and driving an electric car. [About] 80 percent have never even been in an electric car before they used Ufodrive.
BTN: You offer drop-off services. Do you do the same for car returns?
McClean: We have our own locations in dedicated sites in prime city centers and airports. Typically, a customer can go to a location and collect the car using their mobile phone. However, we also have a delivery service. You can say, I want the car here, wherever that will be. You'll pay extra for delivery. You'll get a notification on your app that the car has been delivered to your set location. Then you use your phone to access that vehicle and off you go. And you leave it back at the location where it was dropped.
BTN: Do you have to drop it where delivered?
McClean: You can return it to one of our locations or where we dropped it to you.
BTN: How many cars do you have available overall?
McClean: We never give the total fleet number out because it's very commercially sensitive. I can tell you that in any given location we can sufficiently meet demand, we have a minimum at any given station of 10 vehicles available at any given time. All EV.
Ufodrive's Mileage Philosophy
Ufodrive allows renters to accumulate an average daily limit of 50 miles in the U.S. or U.K. or 50 kilometers elsewhere. A company spokesperson told BTN that "the total is averaged out over the course of the rental. Let’s say you drove 30 miles on Day 1 and 70 miles on Day 2. You wouldn’t pay extra since it would equate to 100 miles total." The price to purchase extra distance is 0.2 times either miles or kilometers in the local currency, according to the company, and any pre-purchased mileage unused at the end of the rental gets reimbursed.
BTN: What is meant by all-inclusive pricing and no hidden fees?
McClean: When you go to the top 10 pain points that all consumers rate car rental companies on, one of the top two or three is that the price is not transparent. You almost never pay the sticker price with car rentals. You get insurance charges, location charges, fuel charges, a ton of charges which are delivered at the desk, where they want to upsell. We don't have any desks. We have an app, so all of our prices are very clear and transparent in the app, and in the first two to three clicks you know what you will pay, and you won't be pitched later on.
BTN: Is charging allowed only at Ufodrive locations?
McClean: They can charge anywhere. We have almost 300,000 chargers in our app in Europe and the U.S. Basically, the app will navigate the customer to any given charger. When they get to that charger, everything is integrated, so you don't need to worry about the charger not working or being available. We make sure the customers are directed only to a charger that is functioning. It's a common problem with electric cars, people are either at chargers which are broken or occupied or are not working properly, or they can't pay. When they get to the location, they use the app and pay for the charging above and beyond what they wanted in the given allowance.
BTN: Do you work with companies to get into their preferred travel programs?
McClean: We have. Not as extensively in the U.S. yet, we're still pretty new in the U.S., but we have Ufodrive for Business. One of the big attractions of using our service is massive time savings. You can wait [an] average of about 40 minutes in the car rental process. We are two minutes. On top of that, we're given carbon credits, recording the carbon savings the driver is accumulating. And at the end of that drive, they can see [they've] saved X CO2, and we can give company statements … 'Your company has saved X in terms of CO2.' That's very popular, especially in Europe. A lot of companies have ESG goals and carbon-saving targets, and we contribute to that. We can show exactly what you used with an Ufodrive service versus a traditional [internal combustion engine] rental. That's one way of getting into companies.
We've done deals with airlines, airline affiliate programs like [Lufthansa's] Miles & More, for example. We've done deals with organizations with multiple branches in Europe, and we give set rates and discounts. Mostly European, but we're looking to launch in the U.S. Our priority is to get locations open first.
BTN: What is your roadmap for gaining more corporate clients?
McClean: We want to continue building out our locations in those major cities in the U.S. That's very important for car rental, because if you are going to do a deal with a major corporation, they want to know they can rent in Seattle or San Antonio or wherever. We want to get those locations up and running, most by the end of 2023. Once we do that, we then want to target those big corporations who made commitments to clean mobility and CO2 savings, demonstrate our service in terms of time savings and climate impact and promote it in that way. We are going to do that through the OTAs, the booking engines and so on, but we've already got a couple of travel OTAs on our books that are currently routing business traffic to us … but we also want to go directly to major corporations. We've started talking in the States to a couple major corporations, not just about using our B2B service. We also provide software to help them transition their fleets to electric. We do that as a separate business line.
BTN: Do you have a dashboard for corporate clients where they can manage their program?
McClean: We basically white-label what we have branded to their particular needs. … We can tailor the interface, and that is their interface, and they can book through that. We have very rich real-time KPIs. In terms of how much mileage driven, what is the climate impact for a specific journey … we can break it down per use or total.
BTN: What else is in the pipeline?
McClean: We are now doing delivery at a number of different airports. That's an area we are growing. We have that [in the U.S.] at Chicago O'Hare and San Antonio [with plans to begin offering airport delivery at Austin in August as well as LAX and Miami this fall]. It's in a lot of places in Europe, major inbound airports where a lot of American businesses fly into.