Written by?/?Zhu Han
Editor?/?Zhang Nan
Designed by?/?Zhao Haoran
Competition on the travel track There are more and more opponents, and Didi can’t afford to wait.
On March 25 this year, before Wuhan announced the end of the lockdown, Didi Chuxing issued a letter to all employees. The goal for the next three years was "0188", that is, "0 major safety incidents and more than one service per day". billion orders, domestic travel penetration rate exceeds 8%, and global service user MAU exceeds 800 million."
A few months later, before the National Day, Didi claimed to have set a record of 60 million orders in a single day, but many pressures from all parties did not dare to stop.
On the one hand, it is the pressure from Shouqi Ride-hailing, T3 Travel, Caocao Private Car and various local travel service providers to share the market; on the other hand, the ride-hailing incident has brought a heavy blow to Didi. Safety pressure; coupled with a series of pressures from capital such as questioning the decline in valuation and the delay in listing progress, have made Didi move forward with a heavy burden.
This year, Didi is trying to "start over": launching Qingju Bicycle in an attempt to seize the two-wheeled vehicle market; launching HuaXiaoZhu to fight for prices and sinking the market; restarting ride-hailing and reopening at night Travel services; restart Kuaidi, hoping to consolidate the taxi market; launch the e-commerce project Orange Heart Selection to accelerate traffic monetization...
Behind the series of actions, Didi is trying to prove to the outside world that it still has important The possibility of returning to the original highlight moment.
On November 16, Didi announced the release of the world’s first customized online ride-hailing car, D1. This is another new story Didi is trying to tell.
Didi said that this car is based on the 550 million passengers, tens of millions of driver needs, and tens of billions of trip data on the Didi platform. It is targeted at online ride-hailing travel scenarios and has human-computer interaction and driver interaction in the car. It carries out customized design in various aspects such as ride experience and Internet of Vehicles, and jointly designs and develops it with BYD.
"Green fruit-colored" appearance, exclusive "rainbow pick-up lights", electric sliding doors, driver's customized seats, rear entertainment large screen... At the press conference, Didi Chuxing founder and CEO Cheng Wei, Didi President Liu Qing, and Didi Chuxing Vice President and D1 Chief Product Officer Yang Jun all praised this "new car" and tried to prove by zooming in on the details, "This is a car designed for people to enjoy travel." A new species of automobile.”
However, is it really a "new species", or is it telling stories in the name of a new species? Didi is busy setting up the stage, do drivers and passengers really pay the bill? Can "customization" open up a new pattern in the travel industry?
In addition to interviewing Didi Chuxing, Auto Business Review also interviewed car designers, travel company competitors, Didi drivers and other related experts, and got some answers.
A “new species” without breakthrough
In Didi’s story, D1 has a breakthrough significance like a milestone. Yang Jun, vice president of Didi Chuxing and head of D1 product, summed it up as, "The size of an A-class car, the wheelbase of a B-class car, the rear space of a C-class car, and the ease of getting in and out of a business car."
But in fact, as a customized car, D1 does not have a radical and revolutionary breakthrough compared with traditional online ride-hailing cars. A senior Chinese car designer told Auto Business Review: "In general, the idea of ????this car is not as radical as I expected."
In his view, since it is specially built for online ride-hailing , it should be to establish a new category, break away from competition with traditional sedan models, similar to London Black Taxi and Hong Kong Box Crown, fundamentally break the idea of ??letting passengers compare with other models, and completely enjoy a brand new Unique experience.
From the appearance point of view, D1 is only a fusion of a hatchback and a small MPV. Although it has made certain optimizations in terms of actual space and functional experience, it still fails to achieve the experience of a special car.
The so-called sliding door design allows passengers to get off the car without the door hitting a sudden moving object from outside, but it also allows the passengers themselves to be hit. A Didi driver told Auto Business Review that if there was a rearview mirror in the passenger area, it might be a better solution to the problem. Of course, this is a bit unrealistic.
D1 is currently displaying auxiliary functions such as passengers using Didi Travel APP to control the vehicle temperature in advance before getting on the bus, a large screen for passengers in the back row that can provide audio and video entertainment, customized seats for drivers and AI voice assistants. Functions such as ordering and receiving orders can only be regarded as customized improvements for online ride-hailing developed based on travel scenarios, but many of them are pseudo-demands and there is no breakthrough.
As a pure electric model, D1’s battery performance and endurance also need to be tested. As an online car-hailing service, charging costs are part of the factor that affects driver income. As far as existing charging technology is concerned, there are still efficiency issues in charging to a certain extent.
In terms of battery performance, the problem of halved battery life caused by the hot wind heating in cold northern areas in winter has also seriously affected the operation of online ride-hailing services. For example, drivers often set the temperature to a low constant heating temperature in exchange for longer driving range. However, users will use their mobile phones to independently set higher gears and higher heating temperatures, which will inevitably seriously affect battery life.
A senior user experience strategy expert in the automotive industry believes that online car-hailing corresponds to different levels of consumer demand and different levels of services also come from the driving/riding experience of the car. This A-class model is positioned It is somewhat general, and there are many problems with inaccurate crowd positioning in the innovation point of point overview.
In fact, D1 has not yet solved many of the key issues that restrict the development of online ride-hailing.
It is worth noting that this time D1 is produced jointly by Didi and BYD. As early as two years ago, Didi also reached a strategic cooperation with its predecessor Chehejia, with the same purpose of producing Custom car. At that time, the two parties planned to cooperate to develop an electric MPV, internally coded D01, which would use the same chassis as the Lideal ONE and be customized for Didi Youxiang and ride-sharing businesses.
Automotive Business Review learned that D01 is more groundbreaking in its design concept, trying to remove the co-pilot and use it exclusively for luggage storage. The method of cooperation between the two parties is also a model of investing more in developing a dedicated platform to create customized cars. However, the D01, which was originally planned to be mass-produced early this year, eventually came to a standstill due to funding interruptions.
This user experience strategy expert believes that the physical definition of online ride-hailing requires more clear feature output. What it brings to people is a revolutionary architectural form, avant-garde appearance matching, and a new experience with technology. High-end service form. In his view, "Online ride-hailing is not a low-cost, low-price basic ride service, but a revolution in the way people travel in the future."
Is Didi going from C2C ??to B2C?
“It is not so much an improvement in the design of the car itself as it is an improvement in the business model and Didi’s large-scale development in the direction of B2C and standardization.” Tan Yi, CEO of GOFUN Technology, believes that this is the reason why Didi Adjustment of drip strategy.
At present, there are roughly three models in the entire online ride-hailing market: one is the C2C asset-light model led by Didi; the other is the B2C asset-heavy model represented by T3 Travel and Cao Cao; the third is the asset-heavy model represented by T3 Travel and Cao Cao; Internet platform aggregation model represented by Meituan and Amap.
The B2C model is conducive to standardization. Before the emergence of D1, Didi also tried to purchase self-operated vehicles and set up an automobile asset management center. However, these vehicles were difficult to sublease to drivers through leasing companies. They were idle for a time and were gradually liquidated by Didi.
Didi told Auto Business Review that in the future, D1 will be rented and driven by recruited car-free drivers through cooperative asset holders.
After the emergence of D1, Didi can, on the one hand, reduce vehicle costs by cooperating with large orders from OEMs; on the other hand, with a large number of car-less drivers and data traffic, Didi can quickly Introduced into the customized car D1, it provides drivers with a series of services such as car finance, insurance, and charging, realizing a closed loop of the entire industry chain from pre-car to after-sales. Whether it is insurance or after-sales, the profit margin of this chain can be imagined.
Cheng Wei said at the press conference that D1 will realize the transformation from paying by vehicle to paying by kilometer. In Cheng Wei's words, this is called "the industrial upgrading of automobiles."
Tan Yi believes that this can be seen as a change from the vehicle procurement method to the time-sharing procurement method. Continuously realizing commissions during the driver's operation process is invisibly extending the use time of the vehicle, operating the property rights with the right of use, and diluting the entire cost.
Several Didi ride-hailing drivers in Guangzhou sneered at D1. According to the rules they learned that drivers do not have to pay for D1 but pay additional usage fees per kilometer, no one would do it. No one will accept this kind of greater kidnapping of the driver.
They told Auto Business Review that currently, excluding Didi’s commission and expenses such as driving without a car, the driver’s profit per kilometer is about 1.7 yuan. Based on the current rental price of a Beijing car EU5 in Guangzhou, which costs 4,000 yuan per month, electricity costs 0.15 yuan per kilometer, and driving 100,000 kilometers per year, they can earn 107,000 yuan a year. And if they now have to pay a usage fee of 2 yuan per kilometer, this means that they have to pay 30,000 yuan in subsidies. How is this possible?
Perhaps Didi drivers can earn 2 yuan or more per kilometer. According to Automobile Business Review’s calculations, drivers can earn about 2.8 yuan for a single short-distance transportation without traffic jams, so they only earn 2.8 yuan per kilometer. I can only earn 80,000 yuan. In the past, whether it was through vehicle purchase or leasing, after the driver earned enough money, the remaining profits were his own.
Of course, a travel company executive analyzed Auto Business Review and found that Didi can send more orders to D1 drivers because they are its "own sons." Indeed, if the vehicle usage fee is paid based on mileage, drivers who want to earn more income can only continue to increase the number of kilometers, which means that they must work for Didi Chuxing all the time. This is almost impossible.
Some drivers complained that Didi should not develop flashy things like D1 and think carefully about how to truly reduce the burden on drivers. Didn’t Liu Qing, president of Didi Chuxing, say in May this year that the core online ride-hailing business was already profitable? They are making a fortune, but we are working harder than Xiangzi the Camel.
Automotive Business Review believes that as a new operating method, paying by mileage is how to protect the interests of car purchases commercially? Operating vehicles are different from family vehicles and have many policy issues, including service life, value retention, etc.
Wishful thinking of back-row profits?
D1 has two customized large screens installed in front of the rear passenger seats. Cheng Wei, founder, chairman and CEO of Didi Chuxing, said that these two screens will provide users with audio-visual entertainment service, you can even sing karaoke in the car later.
But these are beautiful words to tell a story. From the perspective of passengers, it is unlikely that the large screen in the rear seat can serve as entertainment function. The discomfort caused by watching the large screen while driving exceeds the entertainment enjoyment, not to mention that there may be mutual interference between the two screens.
Similar large screens have appeared on many taxis before, mostly for advertising purposes. In fact, from a fundamental analysis, Didi’s rear large screen is actually considering the advertising effect.
Senior observers in the travel industry said that Didi, which is developing community e-commerce business, must embed the multiple attributes of traffic into D1. Behind the screen behind D1 is the business model.
For example, in the early days, coupons were used to encourage users to interact with large-screen advertisements. Then gradually embed Chengxin’s e-commerce business into the large screen to realize the diversion of users from offline to online, which to a certain extent can quickly help its e-commerce business achieve a local promotion effect.
If D1 can obtain more personalized tags of passengers, such as user gender, daily active areas, etc., and analyze users through big data, it may be possible to achieve precise targeted advertising.
If done well, the two screens will bring new imaginations to Didi, especially breakthroughs in the e-commerce business. This is also a new opportunity that cars may bring as the third space in the future; If it’s not done well, it’s just the cost of two screens and no loss to Didi itself.
The first batch of D1 will be launched in Changsha in December. The vehicles are currently in production and the first batch of more than 1,000 vehicles will be launched. Yang Jun told Automotive Business Review that next year D1 will be launched in more than a dozen cities across the country. .
The good news is that no more details such as the pricing of D1’s per-kilometer usage fees have been disclosed. If the price is much lower than 2 yuan per kilometer, then there is a certain possibility of its success, but this is definitely not because this is a specially built online car-hailing service.
Auto Business Review learned that not long ago, Didi Chuxing required all types of drivers to put the Didi Chuxing logo on their cars. This inspired many black cars, and they also put the Didi Chuxing logo on their cars. The Didi logo makes it easier for consumers to hail taxis, but Didi cannot enforce the law against them.
This makes many Didi drivers feel painful, because it is tantamount to stealing their business in disguise, so they also accept orders from the passengers recruited, but no longer go through the platform.
This is folk wisdom.
At the Didi D1 launch conference, Liu Qing made a bet, "In 30 years, there will be no large parking lots within the Sixth Ring Road." Thirty years is too long. Let’s see how D1 performs when it goes public three months later.
This article comes from the author of Autohome Chejiahao and does not represent the views and positions of Autohome.