Once, when the trend of the sharing economy receded, everyone witnessed the death of the bicycle together, which was lamentable. However, in addition to the vigorous sharing of bicycles, it also has a "relative" - sharing cars, which was once optimistic about capital and eventually ended up in a chicken feather.
In the industry, Tuge, which was once the head platform, has almost witnessed the rise and fall of shared cars.
01: Serial entrepreneurs
Speaking of Tuge, it is necessary to mention its founder, Wang Lifeng. Wang Lifeng, with great ambitions, has always been keen on entrepreneurship after graduation, especially for the automobile travel industry.
As early as 2011, he enthusiastically planned the "Shake the Car" project with friends. With the efforts of the two, the project finally got the investment. However, unfortunately, due to reasons such as inconsistent business philosophy, although Wang Lifeng did not give up, he could only leave shaking to find a car after eating a casual meal.
However, he did not give up on his dream, but with this regret, he founded AA Car Rentals in May 2013. This time, AA Car Rental provides high-end business travel business, realizing Wang Lifeng's business philosophy.
But the good times are not long, even if Wang Lifeng racked his brains to try his best, but AA car rental still failed to make any achievements, as the days passed, he finally lost confidence in it, and in 2015, he had no choice but to run away, ready to find another opportunity to do a big career.
This time, Wang Lifeng bumped head-on into the "first year of sharing cars", so he seized the opportunity and founded Tuge. Shared car, in essence, is still leasing, but compared with the traditional model, it is more flexible and convenient and short-term, so it is also known as time-sharing leasing.
In addition to Tuge, there were hundreds of time-sharing leasing companies across the country, and the competition in the industry was quite fierce, showing the trend of the Red Sea. In this case, Wang Lifeng took Tuge and launched a series of operational means, and even played a slogan such as "15 yuan to open a big run", and finally gained a foothold in the industry and killed a blood road.
However, in 15 and 16 years, although the development of shared cars is quite fast, on the whole, the market has been tepid, and unicorn companies have not yet appeared in the industry. Until 2017, the outlet of the sharing economy appeared, the frequency of market financing increased significantly, and the relevant departments of the state issued a series of policies to encourage car time-sharing rental services, and shared cars ushered in a climax of development.
A series of good news, so that Wang Lifeng more and more convinced that his choice is right, shared cars must have a great future!
Under such optimistic judgment, even if he learned the news that Youyou Car and EZZY had collapsed in 2017, Wang Lifeng did not care, and continued to run wildly on the corpses of his peers.
Looking back at the past, after sharing bicycles, sharing cars has also ushered in a boom, but this is more like a blind follow-up, a self-carnival of capital. At the end of this madness, is it flowers cooking oil with a golden fire, or is the cliff and the cliff wall dead?
02: Run wild to death
By October 2017, Tuge had made great strides, reaching a break-even point in Shenzhen and a profit in Beijing, and even completed four rounds of financing, totaling more than 200 million. As the founder, Wang Lifeng can be described as full of spirit, and even to commemorate this node, he also held a special conference to announce that Tuge will open the era of shared car 2.0.
You know, at this time, Tuge, which has a bmw mini, Mercedes-Benz Smart, Citroen, Peugeot and other service models, is also in the first-tier cities north, Guangzhou, Shenzhen and other business layout, has been a real giant in the industry.
At the same time, when other shared cars still need fixed-point parking, it has gained many loyal customers by virtue of the advantages of "free parking and relay cars", and has become the first shared car platform in China.
Under the successive victories, Wang Lifeng is determined to accelerate the pace of expansion and march towards second- and third-tier tourist cities. At this moment, he did not realize that the situation was as good as the day and the sky, and the countdown to death had begun!
In March 2018, Tuge officially entered Nanjing, and Wang Lifeng, who was full of confidence, decided to use the strategy of crazy money to subsidize users and quickly occupy the local market. However, the gods fought, the little devils suffered, and Meituan and Didi actually opened a "ride-hailing war" soon after, which greatly diluted the demand for shared cars in Nanjing.
At the same time, coupled with Tuge's deposit of 1500 yuan, it also dissuaded many potential users, for various reasons, the final Battle of Nanjing of Tuge, only lasted for 5 months, it ended in complete failure.
But even so, Wang Lifeng still did not have a dead heart, when he lost to Nanjing, he also came forward to summarize the reasons for the failure, saying that the company's funds were operating normally, this was only a temporary defeat, and the future of shared cars was still bright. However, the form of development since then has not been as optimistic as Wang Lifeng said.
Since September, Tuge has quietly retreated from various operating cities, and even in the second-hand car trading market, Tuge has also appeared in the figure of Tuge sharing cars.
Even in October, Wang Lifeng pulled another tens of millions of dollars in financing, but it was still a drop in the bucket, and it was difficult to shake the overall situation. By December, even Beijing, where Tuge's headquarters is located, was difficult to find vehicles available on the app, and operations were completely stagnant.
In fact, shared cars and shared bicycles have the same drawbacks, they are not only high operating costs, but also lack of specific profit models, relying on user rent alone can not be maintained, can only rely on continuous financing to continue to live, there is always a risk of "violent death".
It is rumored that Tuge, which is in trouble, has begun to lay out the social e-commerce field. It may be combined with the Chaoduoduo app to integrate its social modules into the e-commerce system. Especially in today's increasingly popular shoe speculation, more and more young people refuse to be leeks of foreign capital and support Chinese manufacturing. Those who have been speculated to sky-high prices of Chanel, AJ and other first-line big brands, in the tide of more than less than 200, and even the quality is not lost at all to imported goods, perhaps this is the reason why Wang Lifeng stared at domestic tide brands.
03: Deposit refund event and its impact
December 2018 can also be called the "Black Month of the Sharing Economy". During this period, the sharing bicycle occurred a sensational ofo deposit refund incident in the country, and the shared car broke out the "deposit refund frenzy" of Tuge.
On the 17th of that month, Wang Lifeng was working in the Tuge office of Block B, Jiatai International Building, the headquarters in Beijing. At this time, he no longer had the spirit of a year ago, but was replaced by discouragement. Just as he was immersed in pessimism, the noise outside the office began to rise, and when he pushed open the door, he found a group of strangers breaking into the company.
It turned out that these more than 100 intruders were All Tuge users, and when they found that their deposit could not be returned on the APP, they came to the headquarters together to ask for a refund.
You know, even if it is a deposit of 199 yuan of Ofo, users are going to the headquarters of the small yellow car, not to mention the 1500 yuan deposit of Tuge! And according to statistics, Tuge has 3 million users, with a total deposit of up to 4.5 billion.
Obviously, at that time, Tuge could not come up with so much money, and could only use delaying tactics to perfunctory users with the answer of "15 refund places per day". However, users do not buy it at all, 15 per day, then it is not said that it takes hundreds of years to refund the entire deposit!
Under the excitement of the crowd, some smashed the flower bed, some moved the computer, some shouted with the loudspeaker, and even a user jumped on the desk, pointed out the window and threatened the staff, claiming to jump off the building, while more people asked the company's person in charge to come out and solve the matter. But as the CEO of Wang Lifeng, where dare to come forward, and finally rely on the method of hiding in the garage, he luckily escaped the disaster.
However, if you can hide from the first day, you can't hide from the fifteenth. In January 2019, the user who asked to return the deposit blocked Wang Lifeng at the Liulitun police station for 9 hours, and finally failed to negotiate. In desperation, Wang Lifeng applied to the police station for personal protection.
No one could have imagined that the generation of business tycoons who had once been adults shouted and beat "lao lai" and fell to this point. At the same time, As the industry leader, Tuge's collapse has also accelerated the demise of the entire sharing automotive industry, and many users of other brands, worried about repeating the mistakes of Tuge, have hurriedly refunded their deposits to escape this whirlpool.
Nowadays, car sharing is almost dead. The original Tuge, relying on publicity and promotion, gained a lot of traffic, which can not be described as unsuccessful. But as an Internet company, getting enough traffic is only a prerequisite for survival.
The key is that once a business has traffic, it must also have a way to monetize it in order to survive and grow. However, many Internet companies pay too much attention to the former, ignore the latter, and eventually use huge funds to build castles in the air, but they collapse in an instant, and the bamboo basket is empty!