The parking fee of 100 yuan is difficult for users. Are time-sharing rental cars still gathering dust? | rpslot, lotsa slots guide, idn poker

"This car has been parked here for a long time. It has been more than 20 days in less than a month. I owe several hundred parking fees. Some people wanted to drive away a while ago, but I stopped them. When I heard that there was so much parking fee, I parked it immediately." A security guard in a parking lot in Wangjing area of Beijing pointed to a dusty time-share rental car in the corner and told Understand Note that if no one pays the parking fee, the car will definitely not be able to drive away.

In fact, this is just a microcosm of the various embarrassments encountered by timeshare rental cars.

Not long ago, some media broke the news that the time-sharing rental brand Tuge had withdrawn from the Nanjing market and was in arrears with the wages of its ground staff. Subsequently, Tuge denied this series of news and announced a new round of financing news to boost morale. However, shortly after the financing news was announced, many users once again expressed online that Tuge’s deposits were difficult to refund, no one answered the customer service phone calls, and the online customer service was pushy.

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In Baidu Tieba's "Tuge Bar" and Sina's Black Cat complaint platform, you can see that many users from Shenzhen, Nanjing, Chengdu, Beijing, Guangzhou and other places have recently reported difficulties in refunding deposits and advanced gas fees. Many users reported that it has taken more than 7 working days since they applied for a deposit refund; some have received a reply from the platform and have to wait about 20 days before the deposit will be refunded.

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Some users suggest that users who have not been able to get their deposits are advised to call the local "12315" and choose manual complaints, which may help them get their deposits faster. However, users in some cities still reported that after dialing the local 12315, they received feedback that they asked to dial 12315 in Beijing to make a complaint.

On the one hand, there is good news about official re-financing, and on the other hand, there are complaints from users about refunding deposits and paying gas fees in advance. Is this just a case of one platform, or is the entire time-sharing car market experiencing a cold wave? After all, Tuge is a well-known company in this market, and from the collection and compilation of information from all aspects, we have also learned about the current situation of this market from different angles.

In five years, where is the time window for car sharing?

According to statistics from Automobile Business Magazine, the first time-share car rental company in China is Yika Green, which was registered on June 14, 2013. In the past five years or so, many time-sharing leasing companies have appeared one after another. Especially since 2016, taking advantage of the trend of the sharing economy, batches of time-sharing leasing companies that have replaced "shared cars" have appeared in front of the public, and have gradually gained a lot of support from the capital market.

However, as the tide of the sharing economy subsides, most of these once-popular "shared cars" have collapsed, and the remaining companies have also taken off their "sharing" vests and returned to the old road of time-sharing leasing. Among the companies that have fallen, there are many that have received tens of millions of dollars in financing. EZZY, which declared bankruptcy and disbanded in October last year, is one of them.

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During this period, the market has experienced various ups and downs, and relevant policies have also provided considerable support. For example, in August 2017, relevant departments jointly issued the "Guidance on Promoting the Healthy Development of Small and Micro Bus Rentals", which clearly stated that the use of new energy vehicles should be encouraged to carry out time-sharing leasing, and support should be provided in the layout and construction of charging infrastructure. But after the big wave, looking at the entire market now, among the car time-sharing rental platforms that are still "alive", there is still no independent giant.

Although many platforms have survived, they are not very large. In the entire travel field, the time-sharing rental market has not only not seen star companies similar to those in the shared bicycle field, but also seems to be too "low-key".

In addition to Tuge, which was exposed to various difficulties this time, the situation of several other leading companies is not very optimistic. GOFUN, a subsidiary of Shouqi Group, received 214 million yuan in Series A financing in November last year and is currently considered a leader in the field of time-sharing leasing.It is one of the leaders, but its monthly active users are still far behind market expectations. According to data from Analysys Qianfan, as of July this year, GOFUN had only 1.34 million monthly active users, and Tuge, which caused market controversy, had only 63,500 monthly active users.

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This kind of overall user volume is indeed not on the same level as the volume of online ride-hailing and shared bicycle leading platforms, which can easily reach tens of millions or even hundreds of millions. The shared bicycle industry, which also has a heavy-asset operation model, has quickly said goodbye to its barbaric growth and crazy expansion after experiencing dazzling stars, and has now entered a period of consolidation. The time window in the capital market has closed, and now timeshare leasing seems to be in an extremely embarrassing situation.

High threshold and "unspeakable" user experience

As for the current awkward situation in the time-share rental market, a senior analyst in the industry told Notes: "The introduction of relevant policy incentives at the national level has only released a favorable direction for the market and efforts. However, the main reason that currently limits the expansion of this industry is that the entry threshold is too high. After all, cars are no better than bicycles. When the unit price is nearly a hundred times higher, it is difficult for the platform to cover a wide range of the market in a short period of time. Without guarantees of volume, it is impossible to achieve breakthroughs in the total number of users and operating conditions."

Purchasing vehicles is the largest early investment cost for these car-sharing rental platforms. In order to reduce costs as much as possible, the platform parties will choose to cooperate deeply with domestic vehicle companies to reduce the purchase price. An internal manager of a medium-sized time-sharing leasing platform told Understand Notes: "Most companies will choose to cooperate with different car companies in the early stage, so the purchase price of the vehicle will be much lower than the retail version on the market."

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However, even under this premise, the overall investment in purchasing vehicles for the platform is still huge. Taking Tourgo as an example, the main vehicles currently operated by Tourgo in Beijing include smart, Citroen C3, Peugeot 2008 and other models. If calculated based on the average purchase cost of each vehicle of 60,000 yuan, then the Touge AThe 25 million yuan raised in this round of financing can only purchase about 400 vehicles.

The national market is rapidly expanding, covering major first- and second-tier cities. How many cars and how much investment will this require?

With a small investment in vehicles, it will be difficult to achieve large-area scene coverage in major cities across the country. This will cause a series of practical problems for users such as few sites, few vehicles, and low utilization rate.

However, although the purchase cost of vehicles is high, it is still not the majority of expenditures on these platforms. Data shows that the cost of daily operations is actually higher than the cost of vehicle purchase. The managers of the above-mentioned time-sharing rental platform told Understand Notes: "Normally, the cost of vehicle procurement accounts for about 40% of the total cost of the platform, and more funds are spent on daily vehicle operation and maintenance and personnel costs. Among them, in order to ensure high utilization of vehicles, a large number of ground staff are required to continuously transfer vehicles that have not been used for a long time to areas with high usage."

We can draw some conclusions from the trucks that we often see loading and unloading shared bicycles.

Although the investment of ground staff helps to improve the utilization rate of time-sharing rental vehicles to a certain extent, it also significantly increases the cost of platform operation. In addition, even if the platform strives to increase vehicle utilization as much as possible, the user experience cannot be significantly improved due to low overall vehicle investment, detention caused by parking fees, vehicle accidents requiring repairs, breakdowns caused by violent driving, etc.

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Image source: Weibo @Chen Zhixue

As a former time-sharing car user, Mr. Wu, who works in Wangjing, told Notes: "The number of time-sharing cars seems to be quite small. It is hard to say that they can be found on the roadside as quickly as bicycles. Users often have to look for a car before using it, and after finding the car, they are not sure whether it can be used. After working hard for a long time, we often encounter situations where the car cannot be unlocked (for example, there is no signal in the basement), is damaged, has low battery life, and requires additional parking fees in non-designated parking areas. In addition, quite a few cars are dirty, and you can often see 'souvenirs' left by the previous user."

For him, it is not easy to successfully drive this kind of 'shared' car.

When Dongdongjiao asked him why he still registered and used it since the user experience was not good, Mr. Wu said: "It felt fresh at first. After all, driving by yourself is different from taking a taxi to work. In addition, the subsidies of these platforms were very large before, and the actual useThe cost is much cheaper than taking a taxi. However, the subsidies are not as large as before. The overall prices of these platforms are about the same, and it is not as convenient as taking a taxi, so I applied for a refund of the deposit. ”

Is the rigid need for time-sharing leasing a false proposition?

As for the future of the time-sharing car rental market, some business people have previously believed that the maturity of autonomous driving technology will usher in unimaginable development opportunities for the time-sharing rental market. Indeed, if autonomous driving technology (L4 level) truly matures, it can save a considerable amount of time and cost for users to pick up and return cars, while greatly improving turnover efficiency.

But it can be said that innovation in autonomous driving technology is difficult to achieve overnight. In addition, the maturity of autonomous driving technology will also be fully applied in online ride-hailing and other fields, which will be disruptive to the business model of the entire large travel market.

At this stage, if online car-hailing solves long-distance travel (more than 2 kilometers), and shared bicycles solve the last mile, then where should the use scenarios of time-sharing rentals fall? Purely from the perspective of usage scenarios, timeshare leasing has a lot of overlap with other market segments.

A senior analyst in the industry told Dongdong Notes: "The current time-sharing rental is not as necessary as shared bicycles or some urgently needed sharing projects. In fact, it is very replaceable. Although online car-hailing may not have developed earlier than it, the convenience is definitely an order of magnitude higher, and the price/performance ratio is more reasonable. Therefore, for time-sharing rental application scenarios, market competition is fierce and substitutability is also very high. ”

Facing the current situation of time-sharing leasing, the most ideal usage scenario for ordinary consumers should be that there are available vehicles in the parking area closest to them, and the car is clean and tidy, without paying extra parking fees. After arriving at your destination, there are available parking spaces nearby for easy parking. However, given the current domestic car usage environment and the financial strength of each platform, it is probably impossible to realize such a usage scenario, especially in first-tier cities where land is at a premium and traffic conditions are complex.

So, despite the favor of capital and preferential policies, the timeshare leasing market still encounters various difficulties. Public resources such as vehicles, license plates, and parking resources, as well as vehicle dispatching, operation and maintenance, management, and user habit cultivation, also require a large amount of capital investment and a longer cultivation time.

However, how long can the current market situation give players in timeshare rental venues?

It can be said that how to find a business model that is more suitable for itself and the current market environment between taking into account user experience and overall cost, avoiding subsidy wars like online ride-hailing, and abandoning the huge waste of resources that will occur in the later stages of the bicycle market, are the current primary issues for many time-sharing rental platforms. After experiencing blind expansion and turbulence, the remaining players in the field may wish to think about what new ways of playing this asset-heavy road can be?

[Source: TMTpost Media Author: Understand Notes]