BlaBlaCar unveils new search engine, logo and visual identity

BlaBlaCar, a carpooling community, has revealed a new logo, visual identity and search engine optimised for local transport connections outside of city centres.

Founded in Paris, BlaBlaCar is now used by more than 60 million people worldwide. As the company moves into its second decade, and following the launch in 2017 of commuting app BlaBlaLines, these major changes reflect a new ambition: to leverage the scale of human connection created by BlaBlaCar's community to give every town and suburb the connectivity that only major urban hubs enjoy today.

Bringing transport connections closer to your doorstep

As more people join the service, BlaBlaCar is able to offer greater choice and convenience to travellers. Now, the company has unveiled a product vision that leverages the sheer scale of its current community to make the service "“ and technology behind it "“ more intelligent, bringing transport connections closer to passengers. This will be rolled out through product evolutions over the next 18 months.

Historically, BlaBlaCar encouraged its users to meet at central meeting points to increase the chances of finding a match. As the community grew, so did the granularity of BlaBlaCar's service, with trips departing from over 35,000 points across France on a typical peak weekend. Now, BlaBlaCar will take this a significant step further, optimising its service for the 85% of people that do not live near a central transport hub.

A new search function, launched across markets in the first half of the year, asks passengers to enter their precisedeparture and destination points. On the backend, BlaBlaCar has fundamentally re-engineered its search engine to return more local results for these searches. Drivers enter their basic A-to-B, but BlaBlaCar now uses its new algorithm to match passenger requests with a sub-segment of drivers' planned route, without the driver needing to propose these trips manually. This dynamically unlocks millions of possible local meeting points and, in effect, turns every highway across the country into a major transport line that can be joined at any point.

BlaBlaCar's CEO, Nicolas Brusson, said: "For the millions of people who live outside big city centres, in suburbs or regional towns, long-distance travel is often tedious and difficult to access. Meanwhile, there are cars passing by with empty seats that could offer a near door-to-door experience. Thanks to our new search algorithm, we can make transport connections significantly more local, and give people more freedom and independence than ever before. Our vision is simple: wherever there's a road, there will be a BlaBlaCar.

BlaBlaCar's new logo and visual identity

Together with the new product vision, BlaBlaCar has unveiled a new logo and fully updated visual identity, developed in partnership with Koto.

BlaBlaCar founder, Frédéric Mazzella, explained: "Our early branding was functional, designed to educate people about carpooling. Our playful colours reflected the diversity of our community, and our messages were chosen to encourage the adoption of a new mode of transport. But we've come a long way in ten years. Today, with a community of over 60 million, we have fully updated our branding to capture what using BlaBlaCar is really about: bringing people closer to each other, and to the places they love"