Ola ventures into car rental business: Here are the charges

Taxi-hailing app Ola has now entered the car rental business. The company has put together a new service which charges people on an hourly basis instead of the point-to-point to charges in the current model.

The company in a Google Playstore post said, “Need a car on standby to take you around? Now rent a cab on an hourly package with the all new 'Rentals'. Available for local travel in select cities.”

The rates for the rental services for 4 hours/40km are Rs 750 for an Ola Mini (Tata Indican Maruti Ritz, Nissan Micra), Rs 850 for a Ola Prime (Dzire, Etios, Sunny) and Rs 2,900 for Luxury car (Camry, Accord, Mercedes-Benz).

Currently, players such as Zoomcar.com and Rentalcars.com operate in this segment which has largely been dominated by local players.

Zoomcar's rental services are much cheaper depending on the car as well as package in terms of km. For instance, renting a Ford Figo in Mumbai for the same time span of 4 hours/40 km would cost Rs 380, while a sedan Honda City would cost Rs 440.

However, Zoomcar's offers only self-drive rentals and does not have the option of a driver. Ola on the other hand is a cab service and comes with this option. It may however choose to self-drive option in the future, says an Economic Times report.

Ola's rental service is available in all major 31 cities in India, including Viskhapatnam, Warangal, Delhi, Jaipur, Hyderabad, Indore, Ahmedabad, Chandigarh, Pune, Coimbatore, Chennai, Mumbai, Kolkata, Kochi, Vadodara, Bhopal, Bangalore, Surat, Jodhpur, Mysore, Guwahati, Bhubaneswar, Shimla, Hubli Dharwad, Vijayawada, Siliguri, Jabalpur, Kanpur, Rajkot, Ranchi and Durgapur.

Rival Uber currently does not offer rental services. Uber recently launched its Rs 6 per km charge for the UberGO service in order to compete with Ola Micro. So it remains to be seen whether Uber will follow in the same way.

Ola currently has around 3.5 lakh cabs on its platform and is present across 102 cities, according to an Indian Express report. Apart from this, it has also started an outstation service which offers customers inter-city travel.