Most cars on the road have three empty seats.

Why Pakistan, and why now

A fifteen kilometre commute between Rawalpindi and Islamabad is 660 km a month. In a 1300cc sedan at 11 km per litre, with fuel at Rs 360, that is Rs 21,600 a month at the pump — before tyres, oil, or what the Faizabad crawl does to a clutch.

Four people making that same drive spend Rs 86,400 between them for 4 cars going to the same place. In one car it is Rs 21,600, and each person's share is Rs 5,400. The arithmetic has never been the obstacle.

The hard part is not the maths

Anyone who has shared a car to work knows it saves money. What stops people is coordination, and trust. Finding somebody who leaves at the same time, from near enough your house, going near enough your office. And then deciding whether you want to be in a car with them.

Coordination is what the matching is for. The app does not look for somebody going where you are going. It looks for somebody whose road already passes both your ends: your pickup and your drop both have to fall along the route that driver has stored, and your drop has to be further down that route than your pickup. You can join a car midway. You cannot send it backwards.

Trust is the slower half, and none of it is automatic. In Pakistan the first question about a stranger's car is not is it cheap. It is is it safe. So a driver uploads a CNIC and a licence and a person reads them before that driver is approved — and after that, every seat is still a request the driver has to say yes to.

What we will not do

• No surge pricing. The drive costs what it costs. A wet Monday does not change it.
• No commission on the ride. The money is between the people in the car.
• No invented numbers. Every figure on this site is worked out from one fuel price, in one file, with the date it was set. Where we do not know something — a toll, a bus fare — the page says so instead of guessing.
• No fake proof. The app is not on the stores yet, so you will not find testimonials, download counts or star ratings here. When there are real ones, they will be real.

Where we are up to

The app is built, and both halves of it are switched on: rides inside a city, and city to city between the seven that are set up — Islamabad, Rawalpindi, Haripur, Abbottabad, Mansehra, Lahore and Peshawar. Driver documents go to a person to read. Every seat request goes to the driver, and the seat only comes off the count inside that approval, so two people can never be given the same one — that rule is in the database, not in the app. It is in English and Urdu, and you can watch the car on the map for as long as the trip screen is open.

What is left is launching: Islamabad and Rawalpindi first, then the corridors where enough people are already going the same way. Leave your number and we will tell you when your route opens.