Bolt to finance vehicles for over 1,000 drivers

Over 1000 bolt drivers are set to benefit from Bolt’s asset finance program that the company intends to roll out before the second quarter of this year.

The program will see drivers benefit from both electric and diesel-powered vehicles in a move that the company says has been necessitated by the realisation that drivers' income has been reduced, especially for those who have to remit their earnings to a third party.

The deal which Bolt says is in its final stages will see drivers financed to acquire two-wheelers and vehicles with 1000cc capacity and below, which according to Bolt country manager Linda Ndung’u have a better return on investment compared to vehicles with a larger engine capacity.

“It’s a very exciting development for us as bolt because we’ve realised when we look at our driver partners a big portion of them actually do not own their vehicles and because they do not own their vehicles their cost becomes much higher because they have to remit a proportion of what they are earning to somebody else which means there is less in their pocket."

"So one of the things that we want to do is to actually, maybe in the next quarter or so, have two and four-wheeler vehicles available with very favourable financing terms for our driver partners,” she said.

Bolt has also undertaken to cushion their drivers through in-trip insurance that will compensate both drivers and riders who get injured during a live trip, noting that the cover will reduce the company's compensation expense that may occur in the event of an accident at no cost to the driver.

“We have a significant population base that we can support with this product, and we are able to obtain fairer prices for our driver partners we get better value for the money that will go out there but the money will be covered by bolt because it’s one of our ways of saying that we care about our drivers we want them to be safe we want to help them in the unfortunate eventuality of an accident or someone passes on,” Ndung’u noted.

However, the thorny issue of driver’s earnings still remains unresolved and this resulted in a heated exchange between the drivers and bolt officials over the driver's compensation.

Drivers on their part called for verification of the customers as well citing cases of misuse of the hailing application and driver endangerment.