Spare Driver: A Prototype Mobile Marketplace for Choosing Freelance Drivers for Customer-Owned Vehicles

Vehicle owners in Indian Tier-2 cities who need a temporary driver for their own car usually rely on relatives, acquaintances or local driver networks, which makes it hard to compare candidates, check credentials or keep a record of service quality. This paper presents Spare Driver, an Android-first mobile marketplace prototype that connects such owners with independent drivers. Unlike ride-hailing, the customer supplies the vehicle and selects the driver. The prototype is built with Expo, React Native and TypeScript on Firebase Authentication, Cloud Firestore and Cloud Storage, with Google Maps Platform services. Its workflow covers role-specific customer, driver and administrator views; location-aware driver discovery; manual review of driver documents; booking requests and responses; two-party confirmation of trip start and completion; and booking-linked reviews. The paper also proposes, but does not yet implement, a transparent rule-based driver-ranking baseline, a licence-verification policy and controls against review abuse, and it compares the design with DriveU, Otoddy and Upwork. The project QA record reports 22 automated Jest test suites with 320 tests passing, zero TypeScript errors, successful Cloud Functions compilation and limited physical-device checks on a Samsung Galaxy M17. These results are software verification only. No primary Kolhapur market survey, System Usability Scale study, field trial or load test was conducted, so local demand, usability, operational performance and production-grade backend authorization remain to be evaluated.