It is not audio and video that can prevent the tragedy from happening again.
Editor’s note: This article is from the public micro-channel number “20 Club” (ID: quancaijing_20she), Author: Li Xianhuan, Editor: Wang Xiaoling.
Although nearly a month has passed since the incident, and the driver involved was also detained on suspicion of negligence causing death, it is still difficult for many people to imagine the night before the Spring Festival before seeing the police report. what’s happening. Because no matter what assumptions, it is difficult to give a reasonable explanation for the crash.
On March 3, the Public Security Bureau of Changsha High-tech Zone issued a briefing on the incident of a girl crashing in a car. This unusually detailed report gave enough details. The event process was finally restored slowly without car recording, and many doubts were also explained.
This is a tragedy caused by the pursuit of efficiency. Passengers chose to save money to carry their luggage. The driver accepted an uneconomical order, and chose to go to the next order in order to save time. Under the premise that the driver yaw and asked to stop, the passenger got up and leaned out of the car window, and eventually fell to death.
At least before the driver yaws, both parties make a normal moving order under the rules set by the platform.
However, Huolala chose to be lower in price than its peers, ceded the interests of drivers with rules, planted the source of the contradiction, and eventually became an extreme tragedy under the irrational catalysis. This truth is more realistic and heavier than the “sexual assault” hypothesis previously given by public opinion.
Just can’t speak well
The scene of the crime was a truck. Unlike previous outside imaginations, the two people in the car are indeed strangers, but they are strangers who hate each other.
At 15:00 on February 6, the driver Zhou Mouchun received a moving order from Che Mouchun on the cargo platform. At 20:38, Zhou Mochun arrived at the community where Che Moumou was located. After the two met, Zhou asked if there was a need to pay for moving services, but was refused by Che.
In this way, Zhou’s business is already very difficult to make money.
In fact, in the process of short-distance moving in the city, the time on the road is a minority, and more time is spent on moving things. The car refused to pay for transportation. In the eyes of the helpless driver, this time could have been used to run more freight orders. Generally speaking, these orders are more cost-effective.
The report stated that the total amount of this order is 51 yuan, of which the platform subsidy is 12 yuan, which means that Che Moumou paid 39 yuan. In a moving order that takes an hour or two at every turn, 51 yuan is not a good deal. The driver even counts on the transportation fee, although it is generally only a few hundred yuan. However, Che refused to pay. Next, she put clothes, bedding, pet dogs, etc. on the car in 15 times.
At 21:14, Zhou Mouchun’s car left the community and went to the destination, that is to say, it was purely movingLi took nearly 36 minutes.
This is a critical time. According to the regulations of the Huolala platform, the driver can charge a fee if the waiting time exceeds 40 minutes. Therefore, in the process of moving things, Zhou repeatedly urged, and Cha ignored it, because she didn’t need to pay extra as long as it was within 40 minutes. Zhou knows this well and has nothing to do.
Che Moumou sat in the co-pilot position, Zhou Mochun asked if he needed unloading service after arriving at the destination, but the car refused again.
After the truck hit the road, Zhou Mouchun’s chance to fight back finally came. At this time, he had already grabbed the next business order through cargo pull. In order to save time, he chose to deviate from the original route. The police proved through investigation that this can save 4 minutes.
But Che clearly didn’t know about it. After she discovered that the truck had deviated from the platform’s suggested route, when she asked why, Zhou Mochun did not reply twice. It is not difficult to imagine that in the previous hour, he was at a disadvantage and resented, but there was nothing to do. After that, he couldn’t help fighting back. The original statement in the police report was, “Use a bad tone to express dissatisfaction with Che.”
In this confrontation, Huolala serves as a platform, and there is no plan to resolve the contradiction between the two. In fact, for a long time before, the transportation fee was not even included in the billing design of the App, and the customer and the driver’s master were required to negotiate. Now the platform provides transportation options when placing an order, and the cost is uniformly calculated by the platform. This is to increase the transparency of charges and is welcomed by consumers, but many drivers reported that the transportation fees were significantly lower than those of their peers, which caused a decline in income and also erased the room for flexible bargaining with consumers.
While in the process of driving, Huolala did not provide any safety protection measures for the following users.
Obviously, in Huolala’s product design hypothesis, both parties can negotiate and solve the problem rationally and calmly. But in fact, before the crash, the dispute between Che and Zhou could not even be regarded as a case. Our traditional society of acquaintances has not yet fully adapted to dealing with strangers. In a story familiar to northerners, two strangers only need two sentences: “What are you looking at?” and “What are you looking at!”.
What’s more, in this order, the platform offered consumers a price that was significantly lower than that of its peers. On the other hand, it also gave birth to drivers’ dissatisfaction with time-consuming and low income.
Life in extreme cases
For users, 39 yuan moving is definitely a very competitive price. For users in first-tier cities such as Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou and Shenzhen, the cost of a single flash delivery of about ten kilometers is likely to be more than 39 yuan.
If it’s moving, Beijing’s free moving starting price is 119 yuan, which is significantly higher than the starting price of Huolala.
On the other hand, Che’s order is the least favored by the driver, because the distance is short and the charge is low. According to the survey results, the order routeThe distance is about 11 kilometers, and the total cost is 51 yuan, of which Che Mou pays 39 yuan and the platform subsidies 12 yuan. In order to complete this order, the driver will take nearly two hours from the time it reaches the end, plus the time on the road.
Currently, the minimum wage for part-time work in Hunan Province is RMB 12.5-17 per hour. Taking into account the cost of the driver’s car and empty time, RMB 51 is even lower than this standard.
Moreover, this number is far lower than Zhou’s expectations. It is conceivable that if there is a refrigerator or a coffee table, this girl with a height of 150 may have to pay for the transportation.
Transportation fees are hopeless, and overtime fees are another source of cost calculations. The police report did not point out that the 40-minute waiting time stipulated by the platform includes two periods of loading and unloading. In other words, if the accident did not happen, Che only had 4 minutes to unload the car after arriving at the destination, otherwise she would have to pay the driver. According to a cargo truck driver, if the loading and unloading time exceeds 40 minutes, a fee of 5 yuan per 10 minutes will be charged.
But from the past, Zhou Mouchun may not even get the money. Can Che Moumou be able to finish the move in four minutes? Yes, just move a dozen items from the car to the ground in four minutes, and then take them home again. But the price calculation is no longer important here, and the price of 5 yuan for 10 minutes is not a good deal. It is not so much a cost, but a compensation for the driver’s time.
From this perspective, this case is indeed an extreme case. Disappointed because of the grossly under-expected income, the driver turned into anger. The angered driver eventually verbally spoken to the passenger halfway through and passed it to the car in the co-pilot’s position, ultimately feeling extremely insecure.
Is recording useful?
It stands to reason that the ideal result of burning money to win customers and lowering the price of orders is that after the efficiency is improved, the platform will gain traffic, the drivers will improve the business, and consumers will enjoy affordable services. But in this extreme case, the carefully calculated billing rules indirectly promoted the driver’s illegal operation and the passenger’s crash and death.
Huolala’s business model is different from other platforms. Platforms including Didi mainly rely on a commission on the amount of driver income, and Huolala launched a membership-based dispatch method in 2019. To get a delivery and grab a good one, the driver must pay a membership fee to the platform. According to Zhou Shengfu, the founder and CEO of Huolala, membership fees are the main source of income for Huolala.
Specifically, according to the monthly recharge price, Huolala divides drivers into three levels: junior (199 yuan), senior (499 yuan), and super members (699 yuan). The higher the level, the more allocation orders. For orders that are not covered by some members, money is drawn from the total number of orders in a fixed proportion. That is to say, in most cases, cargo trucks cannot pay the driver’s transportation fees, overtime fees, etc.Profit from outside service charges.
In essence, Huolala is a traffic intermediary that sells platform traffic and priority orders to truck drivers in the name of a “membership fee,” rather than a three-party trading platform such as Didi.
Zhou Shengfu said in an interview in 2016 that Hualala will not subsidize users like its competitors, but will focus on improving the quality of products and services. However, when the scale of Huolala came up, because the order amount only indirectly affected Huolala’s platform revenue, the price cut was swung at the driver.
Xiang Quanxian, a number of Huolala drivers, said that starting from about 2019, Huolala began to reduce the freight rate, from 5 yuan per kilometer to 4 and 3 yuan. Earlier, I could earn about 16,000 per month, but now it’s only about 12,000 per month.
The business model determines that the most positive thing about the platform is not to increase order volume and order value, but to attract new drivers. In addition to setting a lower entry barrier, a truck driver said that the platform will obviously favor new drivers when dispatching orders. Drivers who have just joined the platform will be given priority to grab orders, and the interests of old drivers are in the truck ticket algorithm. Despise the bottom of the chain.
After the car-jumping incident, the outside world questioned whether the platform provided the necessary security guarantees, such as audio and video recording, and one-key alarm functions. In fact, Huolala also proposed rectification measures in the follow-up apology statement, in line with passenger transportation in terms of safeguard measures, and a series of audio and video functions are readily available.
However, if the platform design remains unchanged, a series of safety guarantees will not bring any improvement in terms of the continuous squeeze of the dispatching rules on drivers. Going back to the beginning of the incident, in the order of 51 yuan, the driver watched the girl carry the luggage back and forth, wondering how to save time to start the next order, and the subsequent anxiety and anger, also not because of the audio and video recordings in the car. And there is no change.