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Revel quits its ride-hailing business and will focus entirely on EV charging in the NYC area.
The company has already built some of the largest charging plazas in the eastern half of the US in the five NYC boroughs, with plans for more.
The ride-hailing business is going through the early stages of a turn to robotaxis, but was never all that profitable to begin with even for the larger players, which Revel was not.
Revel may have gotten its start as a scooter company, eventually finding its way into the ride-hailing business in the greater New York City area.
But it is now done with ride-hailing, which it had offered via Tesla Model Y cars (driven by humans), with the cars painted in a noticeable neon blue color reminiscent of NYPD cars of the 1980s.
And in a way, the last few years Revel was Tesla's NYC ride-hailing service, but without any of the autonomous or automated tech.
But from now on Revel will focus on something else entirely: EV charging.
"Moving forward, Revel will continue to grow our Fast Charging business with more sites and cities opening soon," the company said on its website.
This won't be shocking news for those who have followed the fast-moving Revel, which has already created the single largest charging plaza on the East Coast, betting on EVs finding popularity in big cities.
267 Charging Stalls Coming to NYC
And it built more than just one station. Earlier this year Revel unveiled a $60 million plan for the NYC boroughs to build 267 charging stalls, spanning nine separate charging plazas across several boroughs.
As part of the plan, 30 charging stalls are being added to Greenpoint, Brooklyn; 60 stalls to a plaza in Maspeth, Queens; and 20 stalls in the Port Morris section of the Bronx—all in areas that had traditionally been ignored by many charging infrastructure builders.
The single 60-stall complex in Maspeth will be the largest single charging station in the northeastern US.
Other strangely underserved areas are also due to receive significant boosts in charging opportunities with 44 stalls to be built near La Guardia airport and an additional 24 near JFK.
Through this blisteringly quick process Revel appears to have realized one important thing: EV charging in East Coast urban areas has been underserved for over a decade and has been woefully insufficient.
That's a customer base that can be catered to.
Pivoting Toward Profitability?
Revel's turn away from ride-sharing, as an Uber and Lyft competitor, also highlights one particular immutable characteristic about the ride-hailing and ride-sharing businesses in the US: They had been deeply unprofitable for years.
Uber recently turned to the black (after losing almost $1 billion a year for several years), while the margins in the ride-hailing business remain exceedingly slim, even with driver-owners using their own cars.
These ride-hailing giants are now in the process of another capital-intensive transformation as they begin using robotaxis instead of gig-economy human drivers.
This pivot poses even greater questions about short- and long-term profitability for ride-hailing companies.
At the very least, EV charging offers less risk in the longer term, even as the EV adoption rate crawls along at a slower pace than in many countries in Europe.
Will Revel succeed as a regional competitor to larger EV charging players like Electrify America, EVgo, and Tesla? Let us know in the comments below.
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