About this episode
Hamed Yazdi, co-founder of Rideshare Mechanic, puts the true cost of a traditional in-person vehicle inspection at $200 to $1,000 per vehicle per year, most of it downtime rather than dollars. His company runs the inspection over live video in 20 to 30 minutes, including evenings and weekends, with the driver holding the phone as a surrogate for a remote inspector. Rideshare Mechanic has completed over 150,000 inspections in seven years, uses a 50-point ambulatory form and a 65-point wheelchair and stretcher form, and pushes results into broker credentialing platforms by API.
Key takeaways
- Brokers usually absorb the hard cost of an in-person inspection, so the real bill is downtime: a van and a driver off the road, sometimes an hour each way.
- Requirements overlap and never align. One broker wants quarterly inspections, another annual, so providers running multiple broker contracts inspect the same vehicle far more often than any single rule demands.
- Rideshare Mechanic standardizes to the strictest requirement: 50 points for ambulatory vehicles against roughly 36 on a traditional TNC inspection, and 65 points for wheelchair and stretcher vehicles.
- Every inspection is recorded on video rather than photographed. Yazdi says a national chain mechanic once signed his own inspection form from 50 feet away without touching the vehicle.
- A large TNC audited 4,000 Rideshare Mechanic inspections by VIN against its wider fleet and concluded there was no statistical deviation from brick and mortar shop results.
Chapters
- 0:00 Introduction
- 1:30 What are vehicle inspections?
- 3:00 Reasons to do vehicle inspections
- 5:19 How often to do vehicle inspections
- 7:05 Steps to getting a traditional vehicle inspection done
- 8:58 Cost of doing traditional vehicle inspections
- 11:04 Hamed's background and founding RSM
- 14:58 How to get a vehicle inspection done via RSM
- 18:00 NEMT industry using RSM
- 20:25 Are NEMT businesses eligible to use RSM for vehicle inspections?
- 23:53 Success stories from NEMT businesses using RSM
- 28:01 Eliminating fraud and waste with virtual vehicle inspections
- 32:56 RUN BAMBI RUN!!
