Self drive car rental firm Zoomcar eyes international foray by 2018

'We target to have a fleet of 10,000 cars by end of 2017, which would go up to 25,000 cars by 2018 end,' company CEO said.

Self-drive rental startup Zoomcar is looking into foraying into South East Asian and African countries by 2018. It also aims to have a fleet of 25,000 cars in India by then. Meanwhile, the firm targets to break even in India by the end of this fiscal year.

Greg Moran, founder and CEO of Zoomcar was in Ahmedabad on Tuesday for the launch of the firm's services.

He said, "We target to have a fleet of 10,000 cars by end of 2017, which would go up to 25,000 cars by 2018 end. We also have plans to enter international markets, starting with countries in South East Asia and Africa, and hope that it should materialise by 2018."

Adding that the company had already broken-even at a city level (Ahmedabad is the 12th city it entered), the CEO said that the overall Indian operations is expected to break even by March 2017.

Moran did not divulge revenue or profit related figures for his firm.

The four-year old start up which claims to be the market leader in India in the self-driven car rental space with a 70 per cent share, recently raised $24-million from Ford Smart Mobility, a subsidiary of the US car major Ford in August this year along with existing investors Nokia Growth Partners, Sequoia Capital and Empire Angels.

It currently has a fleet size of 2,300 cars, nearly 60 per cent of which are hatchbacks. Moran said that the industry size in India is around 3,500 cars, and is clocking a compounded growth rate of about 50 per cent.

The industry is estimated to be around just about Rs 25 crore in India at the moment but Moran is confident that in the years to come this would continue to clock robust growth rates.It has around 220,000 cars in China while in the US, the number is 1 million. New York city alone has around 25,000 self driven cars available for rent.

Zoomcar enables users to rent a car via a smartphone application for any period they would like and drive themselves around. Its global rivals like Hertz and Avis are primarily offline players. Zoomcar, on the other hand, is a technology driven firm.