Revel shuts down its ride-hail business to focus on EV charging

Revel has shut down its ride-hailing service in New York City, in yet another pivot for the company that started out by renting electric scooters in 2019. Moving forward, Revel will instead focus on its nascent EV charging business, which includes operating five stations in New York and one in San Francisco.

A visit to Revel’s app on Monday showed a message thanking users for “riding with us the last 4 years!” and announcing it has “permanently closed our rideshare service.” Revel’s website echoed the same message, adding: “Moving forward, Revel will continue to grow our Fast Charging business with more sites and cities opening soon.”

“We have made the difficult decision that 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,” Revel co-founder and CEO Frank Reig said in a statement to TechCrunch.

Revel will sell or return the bright-blue Tesla and Kia vehicles that make up its fleet, according to Bloomberg News. The company will also sell the 165 “for-hire vehicle license plates” attached to those vehicles, which Reig told Bloomberg could be worth between $20,000 and $25,000 each.

Revel revealed its first chargers in 2021, around the same time it launched the ride-hail fleet. But the company experienced slow adoption in those early years for its charging business. The company told TechCrunch that total utilization of the network in early 2023 was just 21%, with 19% of that coming from Revel’s own ride-hail fleet.

Fast-forward to early 2025, and that utilization rate had jumped to 45%, with only 12% of that charging coming from Revel’s fleet. The company got a big boost in 2024 when Uber struck a deal to send many of its drivers to Revel’s chargers. Revel says it plans to have “over 400” charging stalls operational in Los Angeles, New York, and San Francisco by the end of 2026.

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