Recently, many old taxi drivers who have been in the industry for more than ten or twenty years have been forced to say goodbye to the industry, which is also complaining to them.
It has been 11 years since the official birth of ride-hailing in China in 2012. In these 11 years, nearly 3 million taxi drivers have personally felt the imprint of the times on themselves.
First, the driver who was forced to disappear
Master Li, a taxi driver, said he felt as if he had been abandoned by the times. Twenty years ago, I pooled my money to buy a license plate, drove a taxi, and with the money I earned from sports cars, I bought a house, a car, and two children to go to college over the years.
But now, these have passed, and in the face of the miserable industry environment, Master Li is a little powerless. When asked what he planned to do next, Master Li looked dazed and said that he would probably go to open an online taxi or a ride-hailing.
The dazzling travel software on the market made Master Li a little moved, Didi Chuxing, Harrow Travel, T3 Travel, and One Feed Hitchhiker, which in more than ten years, quickly replaced the taxi APP, making Master Li panicked and curious.
Who is to blame for the taxi falling to such a point? Only the taxi itself is to blame.
First, taxis have accumulated disadvantages for a long time
Once upon a time, taxis were an industry where you could make money lying down, and many small couples contracted a car, ran in two shifts, and stopped people. Data shows that in 2007, the profit margin of taxis was basically as high as 50%, but after the emergence of online ride-hailing in 2012, it fell directly to 10%.
Previously, relying on the monopoly of license plate resources could make money, so that people in the industry had long been blind and proud of their minds, so when cheaper and better service ride-hailing appeared, there was no power to parry at all.
On the other hand, this is also the fault of the taxi itself. Since a long time, taxi "refusal, not metering, detouring, overloading" and other problems have frequently appeared. In particular, the backwardness of the management system makes these problems like lice hidden under the robe, and they are only lifted when they cannot be covered.
Second, if you want to survive, you can only save yourself
Now that ride-hailing has reached a bottleneck period, taxis still occupy a little market share after so many years of struggle.
This is so because taxis also have things that do not exist in ride-hailing, such as labor relations. The name of ride-hailing is freelancing, and there is no legal effect between the driver and the platform, which can be said to be equivalent to a gray area. This has also led to the insecurity of the rights and interests of ride-hailing drivers.
This is not the case with taxis, where the license plate is fixed, the personnel is fixed, the labor relationship is much more stable, and the driver is relatively more secure.
Then, if you want to improve the situation and let taxi drivers make money, in addition to improving the service attitude and management system, it is a better way out to integrate themselves and ride-hailing.
Many platforms are also aware of this and extend an olive branch to taxis, connecting them to their own back-end systems to help realize the network dispatch and greatly improve the efficiency of taxi drivers.
In the short term, taxis still have a certain lifespan, but this cycle will not be long. The current ride-hailing policy has been implemented one by one, and from the sensory point of view, there is a tendency to become a more intelligent taxi.
If it doesn't change, taxi drivers will really disappear in the near future