Anyone who has tried booking a cab through Uber or Ola in an Indian metro city knows the drill all too well. You enter your destination, find a driver, watch the app show “Driver is on the way”—and then, minutes later, your phone rings. The driver wants to know where you’re going. When you tell him, there’s a pause. “Sorry sir, please cancel the ride,” he says, or, “You’ll have to pay extra.”
The ride you thought was confirmed now becomes a negotiation, and the convenience of app-based cab-hailing suddenly feels no different from haggling with an auto-rickshaw driver at a railway station.
This frustrating experience has become endemic to India’s urban mobility landscape. The problems are twofold and deeply ingrained. First, drivers routinely cancel rides after accepting them once they see the destination details—perhaps the route has too much traffic, the fare is too low for the distance, or it takes them away from a more lucrative area. Second, and arguably more infuriating, drivers often call passengers before pickup demanding extra payment over and above the app-quoted fare. Refuse, and the driver cancels. Agree, and you pay in cash what was supposed to be a transparent, app-mediated transaction.
The root cause of this dysfunction lies in the fundamental structure of aggregator platforms. Uber and Ola function as intermediaries connecting independent driver-partners with passengers. These drivers, operating as gig workers with their own vehicles, enjoy a significant degree of autonomy. While both platforms officially prohibit arbitrary cancellations and extra charges, enforcement remains challenging. Drivers can game the system by cancelling rides in ways that avoid penalties, and the sheer volume of daily rides makes it impossible for these companies to police every transaction. For millions of urban Indians, the result is an unreliable service that promises convenience but often delivers frustration.
Enter Trevel, a new mobility startup co-founded by Sahil Jindal, Managing Director of the DS Jindal Group, that proposes a fundamentally different approach to solving this problem. Launched in Gurugram earlier this month, Trevel positions itself as a “mass-premium” electric mobility platform where quality isn’t enforced after complaints—it’s designed into the system from the ground up.
“For years, urban mobility has trained us to compromise,” Jindal wrote in a recent LinkedIn post announcing the venture. “Late arrivals. Last-minute cancellations. Dirty cars. Awkward calls asking for the drop location. We accepted it because we were told this was ‘how the system works.’ At Trevel, we decided not to accept that.”
There are several Jindal groups in India, including the DP Jindal Group (Jindal Pipes Limited, Maharashtra Seamless), the Jindal Steel and Power group associated with O.P. Jindal’s descendants, and the JSW Group.
Sahil Jindal is a third-generation leader of the DS Jindal Group, a diversified conglomerate founded over seven decades ago by his grandfather, Debi Sahai Jindal. The group built its reputation in the steel and piping industry, becoming one of India’s largest manufacturers of ERW pipes before diversifying into Multi-Layer Composite (MLC) pipes, PVC pipes, CPVC pipes, GFRP rebars (under the Flujo brand), and more recently, cement and hardware fittings.
Sahil Jindal, born in 1982, completed his schooling at Springdales School in Delhi before earning a Bachelor’s degree in Marketing from the University of Greenwich, London, in 2005. He joined the family business immediately after graduation and has since driven the group’s diversification and technological advancement. An active member of the Entrepreneurs’ Organization, where he has served as President of the Noida chapter, Jindal is also an angel investor with interests spanning multiple sectors. His foray into mobility with Trevel represents his most ambitious departure yet from the group’s manufacturing core.
Solving the Uncertainty Principle
What distinguishes Trevel from existing ride-hailing platforms is its ownership and employment model. Unlike Uber and Ola, which aggregate independent drivers, Trevel operates a 100 percent self-managed fleet. All vehicles are company-owned, and all drivers are on the company’s payroll as full-time employees rather than gig workers. This seemingly simple structural change has profound implications for service quality.
When a driver is an employee rather than an independent contractor, the company has direct control over their conduct. Cancelling a ride or demanding extra money isn’t just a terms-of-service violation that might go unpunished—it’s grounds for disciplinary action from an employer. The incentive structure changes fundamentally. A salaried driver with job security and benefits has far less motivation to game the system than a gig worker optimising for short-term earnings.
Trevel has built its pitch around this difference, offering what it calls a “Zero Cancellation Policy” and a “100% On-Time Guarantee.” The company uses AI-powered scheduling and route optimisation to ensure punctuality, and its fleet consists of luxury electric vehicles that promise a premium experience. Current services include city trips, airport transfers, and hourly rentals, with outstation services planned for the near future.
The choice of Gurugram as the launch market is strategic. The city’s dense corporate ecosystem, extensive airport connectivity requirements, poor to non-existent public transport and digitally sophisticated population make it an ideal testing ground.
The company has ambitious growth plans, targeting a fleet of 500 luxury electric vehicles by 2026. It is working with city authorities and ecosystem partners on EV charging infrastructure, route safety, and fleet optimisation as it scales across Gurugram’s various zones.
Of course, Trevel’s model comes with trade-offs. Operating company-owned vehicles with salaried drivers is capital-intensive and limits scalability compared to the asset-light aggregator approach. Pricing will likely be higher than budget cab services, positioning Trevel more as an alternative to premium segments than a mass-market solution. The “mass-premium” positioning suggests an attempt to bridge this gap, but whether the economics work at scale remains to be seen.
There’s also the question of whether structural reliability alone can carve out a sustainable niche in a market dominated by well-funded incumbents. Uber and Ola have name recognition, vast driver networks, and the ability to compete on price. Trevel is betting that a segment of urban Indians—business travellers, corporate commuters, airport-bound passengers—will pay a premium for predictability.
For now, the launch represents an interesting experiment in Indian urban mobility: a bet that the solution to the aggregator model’s failures lies not in better enforcement but in fundamentally different ownership and employment structures. Whether Trevel succeeds or fails, Sahil Jindal has identified a genuine pain point that millions of Indians experience daily. In a market where ride-hailing has become synonymous with haggling and uncertainty, the promise of “mobility that feels predictable, professional, and respectful of your time” is, at minimum, a compelling pitch.