Thoughts on visit to AVIS Taiwan

By Jeff Lee / Mike Song 2022-06-29

     In the future that any kind of thing, equipment, and transportation can be “shared”, the service structure of platform-like concept has been booming in recent years. Taiwan’s UBike service emerged from Taipei City a decade ago, and it’s been deployed everywhere nowadays, then became a role model for other countries. On the other hand, car-sharing services in Taiwan has started a few years ago, and one of the leaders is the AVIS group. Although the car rental and sharing services has been affected heavily by the pandemic starting two years ago, the trend of shared economy will be remained the same in the long run; with the huge resources from the headquarter, AVIS is providing the mobility solution for customers with the more comprehensive professional services in the coming automotive new century.

When the wave of shared economy began to roll over from young generation to all over the world, the concept of car sharing had also began silently changing the automotive consuming market in the future. To buy or to rent a car? Car rental or more flexible car sharing service? We decided to ask Andy Peng, Chairman of AVIS Taiwan, the company that had just been established for ten years, about this big question for all carmakers and car rental companies. The editors of Auto Future came to the northern office of AVIS Taiwan located in Sanchung, New Taipei City in the afternoon of June 28th.

Chairman Peng, who came from a family that runs a car dealer in Hsinchu, started to work in a distributor of a car brand, and then participated in the operation of AVIS in China; Chairman Peng applied to came back to Taiwan and introduced the AVIS system soon after he realized that there will be a revolutionary change due to what new technologies and the concept of car-sharing will bring to the automotive world. He then introduced the sub-brand of AVIS including Budget and Zipcar in the upcoming years. The Trio combination proposed the complete mobility solution for various demands of the sharing concept including long-term rental, short-term rental and car sharing. Chairman Peng has more insightful feeling and cognition for the changing market than anyone else as he runs car dealer and shared mobility services at the same time.

  • Taiwan has well-established consumer finance structure. Therefore, when the “interest-free car-buying” promotion campaign began popularizing in Taiwan many years ago, there are many kinds of installment plans to stimulate the car retailing market to keep growing, which makes the threshold of “car-buying” no longer too high that everyone can have their own cars.
  • Cars used to be an icon of characteristic or personal achievement of owners. However, the young generation born after 1990 no longer take cars (or houses) as an icon in life but take cell phones instead as their top priority. It indicates that the consumer behavior of new generations will cause foreseeable impact to car market in the next 10 or 20 years. The demand of personal mobility will no longer take “car-buying” as the main option, but car sharing and ride hailing became more appropriate options considering the convenience and cost. Especially in consideration of income and expense for the salaried class, it could save NT$ 200,000~300,000 annually by using public transportation along with car sharing services that located near stations in big cities at the “right time, right place”.
  • Chairman Peng felt the atmosphere of BEVs trend 5 years ago. At that time, BEV brands need the operating network of AVIS to promote the usage of BEVs. Now, after 5 years, AVIS still take the long-term rental as the main service of BEVs considering the convenience of public charging, so to match the enterprise users’ driving tendency with fixed charging parking spaces. Certainly, the MoTC pointed out that the public charging infrastructures will be increased significantly before 2025, so it might provide BEV users more options to choose short-term rental or car sharing at that time.

Chairman Peng, who had once worked as the Chairman of Sharing Economy Association Taiwan (now renamed as Digital Economy Association Taiwan), assumed that in the trend of the globalization of sharing economy, the fleet management, operating data analysis and management, and the utilization (turnover of cars and the efficiency of maintenance) will be the fundamental direction for AVIS Taiwan to operate in Taiwan sustainably. Especially for being a member of AVIS on a global basis, AVIS Taiwan could transplant the years of experience in fleet management of autonomous driving vehicles from the Robotaxi project the headquarter cooperating with Waymo, the leader in autonomous driving technology, to Taiwan in the future, so that local customers can enjoy the most advanced new technology mobility services.