Nearly 12,000 lives every year are lost in Egypt as a result of road accidents, according to a 2012 World Health Report, with technical problems in vehicles constituting nearly 20% of the accidents as reported by CAPMAS in 2016.
Due to the severity of the problem, the new mobile application ‘MAYDAY‘ is aiming to solve it by providing roadside assistance services to motorists across Cairo, Giza, Ain Sokhna road and Cairo-Alexandria desert road.
This new Egyptian startup provides various services starting from tow trucks, in case of the vehicle’s inability to drive safely on the road, tire change, battery jump start and an emergency supply of fuel to assist in reaching the nearest gas station.
By simply downloading and subscribing to the application, you will automatically have access to the services at any time of the day, with a provider reaching your location in 30 minutes with the necessary tools to help ensure your road safety.
Mohamed Abo El Fotouh, one of the founders, told Egyptian Streets the story behind the initiative.
“One of our founders had a personal experience where one of his family members was left stranded on the road for two hours due to a technical problem in his car, so he began to think, ‘how on earth is there no service in Egypt to solve this issue?'” he said.
“And that’s when we thought of the idea, because we wanted to fill that gap in the market. It’s also very hard to find a service you can rely on that would always operate and is not too expensive, so we made sure that our services are in fixed costs and include a fast dispatch of providers.”
Despite operating for just two months, the application has successfully managed to assist many clients. In one incident, a client with a handicapped arm had a flat tire problem late at night on Suez road, and after requesting assistance, he was back on the road within 40 minutes.
Another incident involved a client whose car stopped operating while driving to Ain El Sokhna, which was successfully solved after MAYDAY provided a tow truck to pick up their car and sent another car to drive them to their destined location. Afterwards, they found that their the car was sent back home fixed.
“We are gaining more and more attraction from customers as we speak, and we also signed deals with businesses that requested for us to provide services for their employees, and we hope to expand to further areas in the upcoming years.”