it’s about a decade ago since the term “sharing economy” emerged after the Great Recession in 2007, and then it’s only about five years ago that people began to have clearer cognition of this term commonly, even in developed countries such as Europe or America, etc. However, speaking of “car sharing”, there are concepts and business activities like this in Europe or America back to early 1990s. Since then, the concept of sharing economy had become all the rage around the globe, especially among young generations under 30-years-old, this booming industry keep growing worldwide and began to gradually impact the new car sales. Thinking about that when “sharing mobility” becomes the typical model of personal transportation in the future, “buying a car” will no longer be the prerequisite for accentuating achievements in life for young generations. Even though personal car-buying demand has been increased due to the pandemic in the past two years, but I assume that sharing mobility will be an irreversible trend in the long run.
In the early stage of evolvement, most of pure car-sharing services were operated by NPOs; As the business model is getting mature, it branched out from traditional car rental companies to create more flexible and convenient ways to fulfill the demand of car users in metropolitans. More and more startups enter this industry in Europe, America, China, and Japan, etc. nowadays, that utilize more friendly and faster online interface service to facilitate transaction process to get a head start in this booming market…
- Ride Sharing, share rides with strangers.
- P2P (Peer-to-Peer), ride in strangers’ personal vehicle.
- Ride-Hailing, to be simple, it’s just taxi, but it probably doesn’t require the professional driver license (this is different from the regulation in Taiwan). Passengers can share their real-time path with relatives and friends to improve safety.
- Car Sharing, Taiwanese consumers are quite familiar with this model that it can be rented and returned in any designated place.
- RoboTaxi, this is now testing at selected cities around the world, and it’s a new technology predicted to be applied around the globe in about 2030. It is supposed to has lower fees due to driverless, and hopefully to be the typical mobility model for next generations.
According to statistics by McKinsey, ride-hailing services account for more than 90% of revenue of sharing mobility around the world; that is to say, this traditional but convenient way is still the favorite one among countries. In this emerging industry, most companies aren’t from carmakers because the concept of sharing is in the opposite direction of “selling cars”, which is the aim of carmakers. The most common operating model of ride-hailing service consists of information interface for drivers and passengers plus intelligent operating platform as the core business instead of purchasing and managing the fleet by themselves. The three biggest ride-hailing services are well-known companies including Uber, Lyft, and DiDi Chuxing; on the contrary, some of the traditional carmakers utilize the “car sharing” model that has huge burden of capital management, to compete with other startups with the advantage of lower cost for the establishment of fleet. The situation that ride-hailing services and car-sharing are developing separately nowadays is just like the very beginning of BEV entering the market, traditional carmakers react sluggishly to protect their existing benefit, therefore losing the head start to grasp the trend in the future. I assume that ride-hailing services will keep being the mainstream of sharing mobility in the coming decades. And when it comes to 2030s, if car users want to move to destinations in the most convenient way, they are most likely to pick up the phone to call an autonomous driving vehicle with all-new technologies, to get to the places in a way that is safer and more comfortable than driving by human.