Chariot

~ the goodbye ~

a car company bought a bus startup. that is the strange center of the chariot story, and none of it happened anywhere near me. ford paid sixty-five million dollars in 2016 for a san francisco shuttle service, on the theory that a firm which sold cars should hedge against a future where fewer people wanted one. it was a very american bet, made in cities where the alternative to a chariot van was a private car, not the crowded municipal bus i grew up with.

chariot was founded in march 2014 by ali vahabzadeh and romain di vuolo. the idea sat between a bus and an uber: fourteen-seat vans ran fixed routes during commute hours, and riders could help crowdsource where new routes should go. ford bought it in september 2016 as the centerpiece of its mobility push. at its largest chariot ran in ten us cities and london, and it carried more than three million rides over its life.

the problem was that the vans kept running with too few people in them. on 10 january 2019 ford announced it was closing chariot because the business was not sustainable. the london service ended on 25 january, and the us routes ran their last day on 1 february, with the enterprise contracts winding down over the weeks after. three million rides had not been enough to make the seats pay.

~ the chronicle ~

~ how it landed ~

chariot arrived as part of a specific moment, around 2015 and 2016, when every large carmaker suddenly wanted to be a mobility company instead of just a maker of vehicles. buying a shuttle startup was ford's version of that. the trouble is that a shuttle is a low-margin operation with a hard ceiling, and no slick app changes the cost of a van and a driver. detroit had bought into a service business without the appetite to lose money on it for a decade the way a startup would.

~ the long tail ~

what chariot proved, at a cost of sixty-five million dollars plus everything ford spent running it, is that the commuter-van idea is genuinely hard. bridj had learned it, and the microtransit companies that came later kept relearning it. moving small groups of people along flexible routes almost never covers its own cost without a subsidy, which is exactly why the boring public bus that all of these tried to improve on is usually run by a city and not a founder.

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