Most of the earliest time-sharing leases have changed from pioneers to martyrs, and the online car rental policy is limited and particularly expensive, so it is not surprising that the threshold is lower and bicycles with some environmental protection concepts are enjoyed. In fact, before Uber was popularized, there was a wave of time-sharing car rental, but it started at this time. At that time, there were two types of players: Zipcar in 2000 and RelayRides later, both of which were early startups.
The only difference between the two is that the former is a self-owned vehicle and the latter is P2P. At that time, Robin Chase, the founder of Zipcar and an American aunt with three children, was much more popular than TK.
Zipcar spent some time with the hourly rental price of $4.5-$5.5. 20 1 1 completed 3 1% over-raising, showing dazzling performance. However, the membership card of Zipcar 10 US dollars has some thresholds, and its business relies too much on university towns and enterprise parks. Point-to-point irregular linear demand has great demand for vehicle preparation and dispatching system. Another factor is that there are too many up-and-coming stars, all kinds of subdivision scenes are excavated, and competition is intensified. By 20 13, the company had lost $50 million when it was acquired by AvisBudget, a car rental giant.
RelayRides, 20 15 was renamed TURO, and it has never been really popular. After several rounds of financing, 1.0 1 billion dollars is less than a fraction of Uber's, and the percentage has increased from 15% to a frightening 25%. Later, due to the competition between GetAround and Flightcar, it simply gave up the hourly rental business and turned to daily rental.
Instead, automakers have really opened their minds.
For example, Mercedes-Benz Car2Go, BMW Drivenow, Volkswagen Quicar, Ford Ford2Go, GM Maven, Audi On Demand, Toyota Rakumo. The motivation of car companies to do time-sharing lease is obviously impure. To a great extent, these late giants need a beautiful window to show their "innovative spirit", and the subtext is still to sell cars in another way.
This year, the Mercedes-Benz Car2Go named "Jixing" in Chinese chose Chongqing as the first pilot in the Asia-Pacific region, but it is very clever, because the compact Smart fortwo is more suitable for short-distance traffic in rugged mountain cities than mobike and ofo, and the parking convenience is close to that of bicycles and completely detonates gasoline vehicles.
BMW's future strategy is full of Internet daydreams. This year, it talked about the trinity of connected driving, car sharing and charging service, and set up the "Urban Travel Competitiveness Center" to promote it. To put it bluntly, it is to use Drivenow, a time-sharing car rental application, to solve the plug-in problem of electric vehicles with ChargeNow, and to compete with ParkNow for parking resources.
The reason why car companies play time-sharing is not purely because:
1. The rented cars are uneconomical.
Mercedes-benz Car2Go and Car2Share use Smart fortwo, BMW Drivenow uses i3, Volkswagen Quicar uses golf blue-drive models, and Toyota Rakumo uses its ultra-small test electric car. Needless to say, the cheapest Audi on demand, allroad, daily rent 165.
The paradox here is that the normal business logic of renting a car is to choose a Volkswagen model that has been recognized by the market for many years and has a reasonable cost to maximize the income. Car companies do the opposite, one is to do technical verification in actual operation, and the other is to fry the concept in order to store as many customers as possible before mass production.
2. Selling cars in disguise
Another time-sharing service of Mercedes-Benz, Car2Share, specializes in serving large enterprise parks. China's first customers were Tencent and Huawei. According to internationally accepted standards, the break-even point of time-sharing car rental is at least 3,000 units, while Car2Share's self-estimated scale is only about 1 1,000 units. How can we talk about profits? Its essence is nothing more than opening a seemingly innovative experiential 4S shop around those millions of newly rich people. The true meaning of making money at a loss is self-evident. Of course, the situation of local players in time-sharing car rental is different.
The earliest pioneers died or fell, rebelled or ran away, and the rest, such as car disputes, just struggled to maintain. Recently, many new ideas have appeared in the electric car craze, but no company has happily participated in it.
The main reason is that the kinetic energy of tuyere is insufficient. Real time-sharing car rental must meet at least four conditions: unattended, remote reservation, swiping the card to open the door, and time-sharing billing. At that time, the technical reserve was not enough to break the whole process, but today's surging bicycle enjoyment shows from one side that the market has matured rapidly, and those factors that restricted the development of the industry in the past are disappearing or solutions have been found.
For example, mobile payment, before the Didi Kuaidi war, its application scenarios were still very limited, and now it has become a standard, such as credit. After the maturity of Internet risk control represented by Sesame Credit, it is very convenient to freeze and transfer pre-authorization, and financial products such as flower buds or white bars can also come in handy.
The real evolution is at the technical level. Although there is a solution of swiping the card to open the door, it is still difficult to integrate a set of vehicle-mounted terminals that can simply interact with customers. The system must issue different instructions according to the results of verifying user information. In the past, the popular method was to add password verification outside the credit card system, which did not support high-frequency consumption scenarios in terms of stability and timeliness, and the way to unlock the key was also related to the charging node, such as whether to swipe the card to open the door or charge when the car caught fire. The new technology has catalyzed the market, and the direct benefit is that there are more new concepts that can be self-bound for time-sharing leasing, such as electric vehicles that have become standard and driverless cars in the future.
Time-sharing is confusing, but the business logic of time-sharing still needs self-verification.
1, whose pipes are the car companies and operating platforms?
The current trend is that the time-sharing platform is deeply bound with car companies, and a single type of electric vehicle is obtained from car companies. There are more than 500 companies registered in Beijing alone, with financial owners such as BAIC, JAC, Brilliance, Chery, BYD and Roewe behind them. This has three advantages. On the one hand, car companies have government subsidies for new energy and are willing to spend money to promote scene operations. On the other hand, consumers have no choice but have the motivation to adopt early adopters, and the platform also controls the spillover.
However, the essence of this model is to turn the time-sharing car rental company into a 4S shop that only provides test drive or rent purchase. It is an accessory tied to the interest chain of car companies. It is impossible for the platform to quickly expand its scale and then control the upstream manufacturers. It is even more impossible to pipeline the three major communication operators like WeChat. Time-sharing lease is just a negative example in the era when the Internet platform reacts against entities.
2. Can 2.P2P play well?
Time-sharing lease deals with irregular short-term demand, which requires higher vehicle control, self-sustaining maintenance and dispatching ability. Cost control is more difficult than enjoying cycling, which is also unsatisfied by private car groups with strong profit-seeking. Lessons from the past, PP car rental and Jiabao car rental, which are clamoring for subversion, are silent. But if we don't mobilize the social transportation capacity, we can't expand rapidly. The so-called time-sharing lease will always be a toy for car companies, and the business model is too small to be abandoned.
Therefore, the only reliable model is the mobike model, which does not depend on upstream manufacturers or social vehicles. Improve products first, then solve the risk control, and patiently stimulate demand with word of mouth. Maybe one day, the fire of capital will make you not know yourself.
3, parking is a fast knot
Among the common time-sharing car rental modes in the world, Car2Go rarely floats freely, and most of them are station-based modes of French Autolib electric vehicles, each with its own advantages and disadvantages.
The former is convenient on the surface, but in fact it transfers the difficulty and cost of parking to consumers. The abandonment of Car2Go in Chongqing is largely due to the entanglement of parking fees when users switch, and the self-circulation between users and vehicles has become a breakpoint here.
The fixed-point return model is effective in France and Germany, where parking lots are managed by the government, and Japan, where resources are highly concentrated. But in China, where various interest chains are intertwined, not a commercial company can deconstruct it. With the popularization of electric concept, rechargeable parking lot has become the bottleneck of time-sharing lease scale. If you don't form an alliance or develop together with parking applications, it is almost a dead end.
4. Who is timeshare competing with?
Theoretically, time-sharing is profitable as long as it breaks through the threshold of 1 10,000 members, 1000 outlets and 3,000 cars, but how to make money depends on who you compete with.
Under normal circumstances, the travel demand above 100 km belongs to the category of daily rent, and car rental companies have more advantages. Time-sharing lease charges are flexible, so it is not as convenient and cost-effective as direct charter. The demand below 100 km is artificially divided into several parts: mobike and ofo robbed the ultra-short-distance demand below 5 km, which is indisputable;
In the interval of 5-20km, time-sharing car rental began to join the competition, but the competitiveness of * * * enjoying bicycle declined seriously, especially in Xia Dong in two seasons, and the pain index doubled, so time-sharing car rental may enjoy the comfort of * * * enjoying bicycle and the splicing efficiency with taxis that refused to pick up the car and online car rental with dynamic price adjustment during peak hours.
However, in order to seize this market, the over-dependence of time-sharing on parking and charging outlets is the biggest bottleneck, and it is urgent to improve the ability of distributed response to demand and the convenience of the process.
The remaining 20-50 kilometers.
This is the main profit source of travel enterprises, which can be said to cover most scenes of business or leisure travel, and the competition situation is also the most complicated. The rise of online car rental is both a threat and an opportunity.
On the one hand, Uber and Didi released demand, on the other hand, they also brought additional business opportunities. In the United States, a large part of the profit of Maven, the general time-sharing car rental business, comes from Uber's long-term rental, and the average rent of Uber drivers' 90-day orders is as high as 179 USD/week. On the other hand, with the tightening of policy control, some short-distance real-time needs met by online car rental will also be transferred to time-sharing business. As for 50- 100 km, car rental companies are mainly prohibited. As long as the scheduling and service efficiency is high enough, it is not complicated for car rental companies to open such a product line. The travel at this distance has been planned, which is the advantage of the car rental company.
Therefore, the reality is that time-sharing car rental can't be achieved only by rubbing the hot spots of electric vehicles, because the charging scene limits the free return of cars, which is the biggest shortcoming in the experience. In the long run, Fengkou has to learn from mobike and ofo and spread the battlefield in the streets, which depends on both technological progress and the cooperation of industrial policies.
As for the new player who plays high platform diving with mobike, whether he will become a nouveau riche or a martyr again, there will be an answer soon.