Is Revel’s decision to exit the rideshare business a sign of weakness, or a shrewd business move?

Revel’s distinctive light blue electric cars will soon disappear from the streets of New York. The company has decided to end its rideshare service in order to focus on expanding its network of EV charging stations.

The company says it’s making the move for the same reason it retired its iconic blue electric scooters in 2023—New Yorkers have plenty of transport options, and Revel has plenty of competitors. As a rideshare provider, Revel is a small fish in a huge pond—it provided some 80,000 rides in June in New York City, compared with about 20 million total rides for Uber and Lyft, according to the NYC Taxi and Limousine Commission.

Now, all too often when we hear a company announce something like this, we expect to hear about bankruptcy soon after (successful companies tend to spin out unwanted subsidiaries, or sell them to competitors). But in Revel’s case, this could very well be a wise decision that positions the company for further growth.

As COO Paul Suhey explained to Charged in a 2023 feature interview, the reason Revel decided to develop rideshare and EV charging in tandem is that they were complimentary businesses—the company’s charging hubs kept its EVs charged, and the rideshare business provided the utilization rate required to justify the cost of the charging hubs.

That strategy gave the young company a jump-start, but charger utilization no longer seems to be an issue. Revel told TechCrunch that the utilization rate of its charging network in early 2023 was just 21%, some 19% of that by its own fleet. By early 2025, that utilization rate had jumped to 45%, only 12% of that from Revel’s fleet. The company now seems to see the bigger rideshare players as partners—it made a deal with Uber in 2024, and over the last couple of years, it has seen an increasing number of Uber and Lyft drivers using its charging hubs.

New York City’s Green Rides Initiative, introduced in 2024, mandates that 5 percent of rideshare trips need to be conducted by zero-emission or wheelchair-accessible vehicles. The share of Uber and Lyft trips conducted by EVs more than tripled a few months after the initiative took effect, according to the NYC Taxi and Limousine Commission.

Revel says it will now focus on building charging hubs in rideshare-dense urban areas. It plans to increase its charging stall count in the NYC region from 88 to 278 by the end of next year, and hopes to be operating some 2,000 chargers in New York, Los Angeles and San Francisco by 2030.

“The best way we can keep the EV transition moving forward is by ending our rideshare service and focusing on building the fast-charging infrastructure our biggest cities need to keep going electric,” said Frank Reig, Revel’s co-founder and CEO.

Sources: New York Times, TechCrunch

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