Alto Launches Electric Vehicles in Dallas

A ride service company in Dallas launched a fleet of all-electric vehicles last month.

Alto — a luxury rideshare service that offers a company-owned fleet of vehicles and employs its own drivers instead of using contractors — launched 12 KIA EV-9s as part of the company’s goal to put 100 electric vehicles on Dallas streets by year-end, reported The Dallas Morning News. Unlike other lift services, the company’s drivers are paid hourly wages.

The Dallas-based company was founded in 2018 by Boris Blanche, Patrice Crisinel, and Will Coleman.

“We think electric is the future, and our goal is to be 100% electric,” Coleman, who serves as Alto’s CEO, told DMN. “It will take us different amounts of time to make that transition in different cities, but we know that we can scale from here very quickly.”

Alto’s drivers will be trained on driving the new EVs so riders can expect consistent service.

“We think we can offset some of those traditional challenges with EVs through our model, and that will help us keep our costs lower than our competitors and allow us to move more quickly,” Coleman told DMN.

The new EV experience will not change the cost of a ride or impact the company’s price structure.

“Typically, the break-even point for someone to kind of realize the cost savings that’s attributable to an EV is 50, 60, 70,000 miles into the lifespan of the vehicle,” Coleman said, per DMN. “A company like ours can better support that kind of cost trade-off than an individual.”

The company intentionally puts fewer cars on the road than its competitors.

“In order to serve the same number of customers with an 11-minute wait time versus a five-minute wait time, we actually need something like six to 10 times fewer vehicles on the road, and that’s a really important part of creating a more efficient solution for cities,” Coleman told DMN.

The EVs have a home location where they stay between drives, so drivers do not have to stress about finding a charging station, Coleman told DMN.

“Because we can bring together both our own dedicated charging and the vehicles into one place, that allows us to kind of overcome that constraint in a way that an individual might not be able to,” Coleman explained to DMN. “We think that our business model and the way we work is definitionally going to allow us to make this transition much more swiftly than our competitors or others in the space.”