Left behind once, BlaBlaCar is now steering India’s carpooling boom

When BlaBlaCar first rolled into India’s traffic-choked roads in 2015, it arrived with the promise of a European revolution built on shared rides, spare seats, and a simple app. For a while, it seemed the French carpooling pioneer had found fertile ground: a young, restless population, swelling car ownership, and a nation newly fluent in digital convenience.

But India was already racing ahead in a different lane. Within two years, BlaBlaCar packed up its New Delhi office, outpaced by Uber’s muscle and Ola’s deep pockets. Its quiet retreat in 2017 felt like a missed connection, another global platform unable to decode the peculiar rhythms of Indian mobility.

Eight years later, that story has flipped entirely. According to TechCrunch, India has now become BlaBlaCar’s largest market in the world, expected to clock 20 million passengers in 2025, nearly 50% higher than last year. The country has overtaken both Brazil and France, the company’s own birthplace, in sheer passenger numbers.

And yet, the comeback has been curiously understated. There have been no flashy marketing campaigns, no billboards, and no local headquarters to announce the revival. BlaBlaCar’s resurgence, as TechCrunch notes, has been propelled by quieter forces such as word of mouth, a surge in digital payments, and the expanding web of highways now connecting India’s smaller towns and Tier-2 cities.

A quiet revolution on the roads

From barely 4.3 million users in 2022, BlaBlaCar’s Indian community has grown to a projected 20 million this year, with 1.1 million monthly active users and a peak of 1.5 million in August, TechCrunch reported. Three out of every four users are passengers. The rest are drivers, many of them ordinary commuters offsetting their fuel costs while ferrying strangers who have become part of a new kind of travel culture.

This revival coincides with India’s deepening transport crisis. Trains are overbooked, buses overcrowded, and cabs prohibitively expensive for intercity travel. Carpooling has quietly filled the void, offering a cheaper and more personal alternative for travellers who might once have taken a train, a flight, or simply stayed home.

BlaBlaCar’s co-founder and chief executive, Nicolas Brusson, told TechCrunch that users often describe replacing flights or rail journeys with carpools. “We have lots of examples from users who say, ‘Before, I was flying or taking the train, or not going at all, and now I can drive. It takes three hours, and it’s a pleasant ride,’” he said.

The youth advantage

Nearly 70% of BlaBlaCar’s Indian users are aged between 18 and 34, a generation for whom sharing rather than owning defines convenience. Around 95% of all activity on the platform happens through its mobile app, according to TechCrunch.

While half of BlaBlaCar’s rides still unfold along the 15 busiest intercity routes such as Pune–Thane, Pune–Nashik, and Bengaluru–Chittoor, the rest now originate beyond India’s top 150 corridors. It is a telling shift that hints at adoption in less-connected regions where trains are scarce and bus routes unreliable.

Still finding the money lane

Despite its scale, BlaBlaCar has yet to monetise its Indian operations. The platform remains free to use, but the rides themselves have created a thriving micro-economy. In August 2025 alone, drivers collectively earned about Rs 713 million ($8 million), TechCrunch noted. A typical driver earns roughly Rs 390 ($4) per seat for a 180-kilometre trip, modest by global standards yet perfectly aligned with India’s cost-sharing culture.

In comparison, French drivers earn an average of €15 per seat, while those in Brazil make around €6.5, despite similar distances. The economics may differ, but the cultural logic is the same: efficiency over extravagance.

A new centre of gravity

India’s role in BlaBlaCar’s global map is no longer peripheral. As of September 2025, the country accounted for 13.5 million trips, up from 9.1 million a year earlier, TechCrunch reported. Brazil stood close behind at 14 million, while France, once the heartbeat of the brand, lagged at 5.6 million.

“For us, the centre of gravity has shifted away from our initial markets in Western Europe toward places like Latin America, Turkey, and increasingly, India,” Brusson told TechCrunch.

For a company once written off as another foreign experiment gone awry, BlaBlaCar’s Indian chapter reads like a road movie with an unexpected twist. Its success lies not in splashy campaigns or headline-grabbing launches but in how quietly it has adapted to India’s most resilient travel instinct: finding a way to get there, together.