Editor's note: With the ups and downs, the once-hot shared car seems to be heading towards the freezing point. "Now, it is difficult to find shared cars such as GoFun, I don't know what the situation is..." As consumer Mr. Yu told reporters, the shared cars that were easy to find in Beijing in the past two years have almost disappeared. In the case of goFun, the largest, there are no available time-sharing rental vehicles on the app, only a few daily/monthly managed models.
Through the investigation of different forms in many cities in China, the reporter learned that today, shared cars are difficult to find in many cities. What is the development of the time-sharing rental model built on shared cars today? What is the reason behind its embarrassing status quo? Does the timeshare model work? Whether the "new four modernizations" of cars supported by shared cars should be redefined...
It is difficult to find a trace from hot to cold
Open the app, select a nearby vehicle, use the app to open the door, start driving, lock the door and pay online... This is how car sharing time-sharing rental is not complicated to use.
Nowadays, shared cars have gradually become the silhouette of many consumers' urban life memories. "In the past few years, under the Guomao Bridge in Beijing's East Third Ring Road, there have always been a large number of shared cars, including BMW i3 and Chery Arrizo, Small Ant and other models, mostly small electric vehicles. However, now open these car-sharing apps, you can't find a car at all, and the original parking spots nearby show that there are no available vehicles. Mr. Teng, a consumer who has used shared cars many times, told reporters that at that time, he often used shared cars during time periods such as commuting to work, running business, shopping nearby on weekends, etc. He felt that the cost of sharing cars was cheaper and more convenient than taxis. But over time, he found that the maintenance of shared cars could not keep up, and the condition of many cars was not good or even affected the driving safety, and later there were fewer and fewer cars, even if the car itself that could be found was in poor condition. Today, there are no more shared cars under the Guomao Bridge.
Many consumers have similar memories of car-sharing. "Renting a car is generally for the purpose of picking up and dropping off customers, and you can talk to customers about business and contracts along the way, which is not convenient in taxis and online ride-hailing cars." Mr. Jiang, the marketing director of a company in Beijing, told reporters that car rental companies are mostly rented on a daily basis, which is not very convenient, and in the previous few years, there are also Mercedes-Benz Smart, BMW MINI, Audi A3, Citroen C3, Peugeot 2008 and other models. But the problem is that after the completion of the use of the vehicle, you have to find a nearby dedicated parking lot, sometimes the dedicated parking lot will be far from the destination, in the fast-paced work life of the big city is more delayed, in the "last kilometer" is very inconvenient. Later, just like the shared bicycles at that time, there were shared cars parked randomly on the road. Beijing, Shanghai and other big cities have been traffic jams on the road, random parking of shared cars to the city traffic has a negative impact, is the city management can not tolerate, now almost can not see the shared car.
Around 2015, car sharing and bicycle sharing were hot outlets, but the subsequent development was very different. Shared bicycles are still stubbornly surviving after experiencing market reshuffles, while shared cars are gradually withering away, becoming yesterday's yellow flowers and gradually declining.
The recent situation of head operators is worrying
Looking at it now, the time-sharing rental supported by the shared car is like a gust of wind, coming and going in a hurry.
"Every time you make a single order, you have to lose money, and the money you raise is quickly spent, and the high operating costs and narrow profit channels eventually drag down the company." The founder of a shared car company told reporters that he had invested 500 BMW i3s to share cars, and he was once famous, but compared to the speed of brand cultivation, the speed of "burning money" seems to be faster.
As a former time-sharing rental head enterprise, GoFun launched more than 40,000 vehicles in 84 cities in China at its peak. The platform has more than 12 million registered users, and the monthly number of users has reached 2.356 million. However, due to the rapid burning of money in the industry, there were later difficulties in financing and large-scale layoffs. "Last year, Go-Fun laid off employees on a large scale, and the scale of layoffs publicly claimed was more than 50%, in fact, many departments no longer existed, and past colleagues said that the layoffs were more than 2/3, and the business has shrunk significantly anyway." Zhang Jun, a former employee of GoFun, said that the failure of financing was a major factor, which was known in the company at the time, and the financing efforts that lasted for 3 years were finally in vain, which objectively was a big blow to the business.
In fact, from the beginning of the development of the industry, shared cars have experienced sour, sweet, bitter, spicy and salty, which can be described as a complete set of five flavors. Including GoFun Travel, EVCARD, Panda car and other shared car operators have said in public that shared cars are a heavy asset industry, in a long period of time can not be profitable, if the follow-up funds can not keep up, timely bankruptcy liquidation is the only way to stop loss.
Some of the shared cars that were once in the wind outlet were subsidiaries or affiliates established by automobile companies. For example, SAIC Motor Launched the car time-sharing car sharing brand e-Tiankai in 2015. One year after its launch, it established a joint venture with EVCARD, an electric vehicle leasing company under Shanghai International Automobile City, with the brand EVCARD, positioned as a shared car operator with electric vehicle time-sharing leasing as its core business; in 2018, Xiaoling Dog Travel Technology Co., Ltd., which was jointly funded by Geely Technology Group and Huanqiu Media, was named Xiaoling Dog; and Beijing Qingxiang Technology Co., Ltd., which was established by BAIC BJEV, was named Light Enjoyment Technology Co., Ltd Baiqi BJEV also has the Green Dog brand, as well as Panda established by Lifan Automobile, Yikai formed by Chery, and Car2Go of Mercedes-Benz China.
At the same time, there are also some companies with non-car company backgrounds that have set up time-sharing leasing businesses. For example, Beijing Shouqi Zhixing Technology Co., Ltd., established by Shouqi Group in 2015, with the brand name GoFun, is a new energy vehicle time-sharing rental platform launched by Shouqi Group for mobile travel, focusing on providing convenient, fast, economical and fashionable urban shared travel service solutions; Shenzhen Qianhai Linkage Cloud Car Rental Co., Ltd., established in 2016, the brand name is Linkage Cloud; in December 2017, Mobike shared car was launched, initially in Gui'an New District and the main urban area of Guiyang City. The first batch of shared cars online are all electric vehicles; in February 2018, Ctrip announced that it officially launched the shared car rental business, covering first-tier cities such as Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou, and radiating to surrounding cities such as Tianjin, Yantai and Zhongshan.
Many people in the industry still remember that in November 2017, Didi and the investors jointly established a global new energy vehicle service company, and it is expected that in the next 5 to 10 years, the popularization of new energy vehicles promoted by shared cars and shared cars will become a major opportunity for automobile companies. However, Didi seems to have guessed only half right, and while the heat of new energy vehicles has soared, the heat of the shared car market has dropped sharply.
The survey shows that EVCARD, which was once frequent in the streets and alleys of Shanghai, is now gradually fading from people's vision. "Now not only are there very few vehicles, but the conditions are very poor, and parking in the city is restricted, forming a bad cycle of fewer and fewer cars and users." Mr. Jiang said that it is conceivable that under such a realistic situation, it is difficult for the company to make money.
Now it seems that many shared cars at that time were booming, coming like a tide, and then receding as quickly as a tide. According to incomplete statistics, in 2017, the peak of shared cars, the number of domestic shared car companies once exceeded 300. Data show that in 2017, China's sharing economy industry ushered in more than 100 billion yuan of financing, of which shared cars received more than 70 billion yuan of financing, which is the largest proportion of "big head". However, contrary to people's imagination, shared car platforms such as Youyou Car, Muggle Travel, Tuge, Panda Car and car2go have withdrawn from the market one after another, and it seems that overnight it has poured cold water on the entire time-sharing rental market. In this case, many car-sharing operators have chosen to retire from the scene.
It is difficult to share where the "card" is
"Time-sharing rental is the hardest thing to do." Tan Yi, who used to be the CEO of GoFun Travel, said in an interview that sharing cars is not a business that can expand rapidly on a large scale, but a process of walking and watching, which needs to be explored and tried, and it is inevitable that the initial stage cannot succeed, but the ultimate model of time-sharing leasing must be a model that is conducive to the travel of urban people. At the same time, he believes that if the shared car is well operated, it is more promising than the online car, and the online car relies on market regulation and there is a development ceiling.
Industry insiders also put forward their views from their own perspectives. "If consumers personally buy mid-to-high-end cars, they pursue a sense of comfortable experience and added value in many aspects such as fewer faults, strong brand power, and face-loving, but shared cars do not have these added values." Xue Xu, secretary general of the Marketing Expert Committee of the China Market Society (Automobile), said that although shared cars have dipped in the light of the sharing economy, they have not brought benefits to consumers or brought profits to operators. On the one hand, the rent of time-sharing leasing has almost no advantage over taxis and online car-hailing, coupled with the limited parking point, high continuous use of parking costs, vehicle maintenance and repair or charging in a timely manner, etc., the number of users is rapidly decreasing after the first wave of experience climax, which brings difficulties to the operator's subsequent profitability; on the other hand, the operator is also after experiencing the first wave of financing, due to the rapid shrinking of the market, the second wave of financing is doubly difficult. The lack of funds also causes the maintenance and repair or charging of vehicles to fail to keep up, reducing the consumer's sense of experience, making it easy to enter a vicious circle.
The end of shared cars is also related to "congenital insufficiency". "The reason why many car-sharing companies cooperate with car companies under the umbrella of car companies or in the open and covert, there are also some 'mysteries'." Hu Zhongkai, a researcher at the Digital Economy Application Research Center of Zhejiang University, told reporters that one situation is that in previous years, the operation of new energy vehicles must have a 20,000-kilometer driving record to receive subsidies, so shared cars have become a tool for "running mileage to save data"; another situation is that the new energy vehicles produced by some car companies were not selling well, so they were put into the under-set travel companies to increase sales on the books. At that time, these new energy vehicle products had some unsatisfactory points in terms of mileage and the performance of the vehicle itself, so in the case of slow sales of vehicles, they were handed over to the shared car market. As a result, many vehicles will expose various problems in use, dampening the enthusiasm of consumers and accelerating the cooling of the time-sharing rental market.
In fact, in the actual use of shared cars, operation and maintenance cannot keep up, which also adds to the blockage of consumers. Li Qi, an employee of a company in Hangzhou, said that users parked at will, the health situation in the car was worrying, and the operation and maintenance personnel did not charge in time, and similar problems abounded. Mr. Teng told reporters that of course, the shrinking market also has the reason for the reduction in demand under the epidemic, but the personalized travel demand brought by the epidemic is more. If car-sharing had been done well, the market could have been bigger.
"It should be said that it is a multi-faceted and multi-level reason, coupled with the immature operating model, which has led to the decline of shared cars." Xue Xu told reporters.
Transformation failed Business models are difficult to understand
After experiencing market baptism, the characteristics of time-sharing leasing of heavy assets and heavy operations have surfaced, and the industry not only has high vehicle purchase costs and operating costs, but also has problems such as low operational efficiency and difficulty in cultivating user behavior habits due to long operating chains, and the key operating models have not yet been opened.
For the operation mode of time-sharing leasing, the exploration of the head operator Go-Fun is to transform the previous pure self-operated model into a new model of "self-operation + franchise", and soon let the new model begin to land. In addition to this, GoFun has also added vehicles operated in various cities. In fact, after the launch of the "self-operated + franchise" model, there have indeed been some results for a period of time.
At the end of 2019, GoFun has covered 80 cities, including 40 self-operated cities and 40 franchise cities. "The asset-heavy operating model of this industry determines that it is impossible to make a profit in the short term." Zhang Jun believes that the franchise model is more unstable and uncertain than self-operation, especially after the interests of franchisees are damaged, they choose to withdraw, which in turn damages the brand image, which is more difficult to repair the impact on operators. Moreover, just parking vehicles in the city rental space is a huge expense, such as in large and medium-sized cities, each car in the parking lot is calculated as a minimum of 50 yuan a day, and the release of 100 cars is 5,000 yuan a day, and a month is 150,000 yuan. The average use time of each shared car is only a few hours per day, and the income may not be enough to cover the parking fee.
In the timeshare rental market, there has never been a successful profit model for car sharing, and price increases are not a good idea. GoFun also once increased its price, from 0.3 yuan per minute to 0.54 yuan per minute, but users found that such a usage fee was no different from online car-hailing, and they did not want to use a shared car.
In the exploration of the operating model, when encountering downward pressure on the market, GoFun has set up two sub-brands under the main brand " GoFun Travel" and "GoFun Car Service", trying to transform into a technology platform that integrates travel and vehicle service management, and launching a C2C model for dealers and personal vehicles to enter the network, allowing C-end private cars to enter the operating fleet in order to further reduce operation and maintenance costs, but the above models ultimately failed. "Cars are different from other assets, buying a car often costs more than 100,000 yuan, and almost no one is willing to hand over their car to the platform management and let others drive." The owner of the car, Mr. Zeng, said.
Is there a future for sharing?
The superposition of factors such as unsolved operating models, unsmooth transformation, and user loss will push shared cars into the downward curve of the market. From consumers to operators are thinking, is there a future for timeshare?
"There is definitely a market demand for timeshare, but the operating model needs to be reconstructed and explored." Tan Yi believes that in the case of traffic restrictions in some cities, short-distance business travel and short-distance shopping tours on weekends and holidays are its application scenarios.
For the market demand for shared cars, a consulting company predicts that China's time-sharing rental cars will reach 600,000 in 2025, and China's shared travel will reach 37 million person-times per day in the future, corresponding to a market capacity of up to 380 billion yuan per year, and the associated market capacity brought by potential demand is expected to reach 1.8 trillion yuan.
At the same time, the annual report of a shared car operator shows that if 600 shared cars are released, the annual operating cost will total about 80 million yuan (including vehicle purchase costs), and the annual revenue will be about 12 million yuan based on the frequency of 220,000 times a year, and it will take at least 7 years to recover the cost.
Business models remain a core issue. If the business model does not work, the shared car operator will not be able to make a profit. "If timeshare leasing is to be profitable, it must first reduce costs, continue to obtain financing, and form a profitable business model." Hu Zhongkai said that on the one hand, through cooperation with car companies, reduce the cost of car procurement, or take the way of leasing and selling to obtain the low-end version of the vehicle company for the commercial operation of sharing car time-sharing, similar to the new energy taxis in some cities, and strive to reduce costs is the basis; on the other hand, while strengthening vehicle maintenance and maintenance, there must be marketing measures to encourage users to use vehicles, such as when the online car opens up the market, it is very critical for users to trust shared cars and form daily use habits. Only by doing these basic work well can we attract investors, retain consumers, and form a closed loop of profitability.
"For the shared car time-sharing rental operation model, if you look at the travel field, in theory, the market space exists, and the key lies in the formation of a profitable business model." Xue Xu analyzed that perhaps car intelligence and electrification can bring new opportunities for shared cars, such as self-driving taxis in Beijing Yizhuang Economic and Technological Development Zone that have entered commercial operation are very "sought-after", and automatic driving can create a new business model for time-sharing leasing. "In this way, shared cars can usher in a new stage of real and healthy development at a high starting point and a high level." Xue Xu believes that this is also the key to his steady and far-reaching behavior.
Text: Zhao Jianguo Photo: Zheng Yi Zhang Zhongyue Editor: Chen Wei Layout: Liu Xiaoye
Add a chicken leg to the editor!