In the past few days, the truck driver Jin Deqiang committed suicide by taking poison for a fine of 2,000 yuan for “Beidou disconnection”, which is embarrassing. He is 51 years old this year and has been driving a truck for 10 years. He earns 200-400 yuan a day and supports a family of six, including a 70-year-old mother, 3 children and a wife who grows crops. In middle age, he also suffers from high morbidity, such as diabetes and heart disease.
Jin Deqiang chose to give up his life because “frozen three feet is not a day’s cold”, and “Beidou dropped and 2,000 yuan fine” is “the last straw to crush the camel.” Before committing suicide by poisoning, Jin Deqiang left a suicide note among the car friends. In the face of death, he didn’t show much panic in his suicide note, instead he showed a sense of calmness. People have to repeatedly try to figure out the phrase “I use my death to wake up leaders to pay attention to this matter”, which is a bit like David Gore in the movie “The Life of David Gore”. Their circumstances and demands are quite different, but they all choose to give up their lives to attract some people’s short-term attention.
Did Jin Deqiang use his life in exchange for “the leadership’s attention to this matter”? We don’t know, and even the changes brought about by this incident may be minor, but at least two issues that affect the 30 million freight driver group and even more of the general public have been brought to our eyes: The first is the Beidou satellite locator. The defect of the product is the possible negligence of the supervisory department.
1/3 of the equipment is unqualified
Beidou, which we usually understand, is the Beidou satellite navigation system, which is different from the “Beidou equipment” installed on Jin Deqiang trucks. The Beidou satellite navigation system is a national infrastructure that took 26 years, invested more than 12 billion U.S. dollars, and launched 59 satellites to complete. It has two major functions: navigation and positioning and communication and data transmission.
On the truck”Beidou Equipment” is actually a product based on the positioning and navigation services provided by the “Beidou Satellite Navigation System”, and it is also a type of driving recorder. This kind of equipment is mainly composed of mainframe, satellite antenna, mobile communication antenna, display screen and other components. Nowadays, there are also some high-end equipment added with printers, cameras and other components, and the price ranges from several hundred to thousands of yuan.
Many suppliers that provide Beidou driving recorders are mostly OEMs and do not have intellectual property rights such as technical patents, as long as the products comply with the relevant regulations and standards of the Ministry of Communications and the Ministry of Public Security. Jiang Lin once sold the Beidou driving recorder. He witnessed the process of the market from scratch due to the promotion of policies. Beidou vehicle equipment manufacturers and operators have sprung up like bamboo shoots after a rain. “In order to speed up the progress, In the low-price competition, the equipment price has been cut several times a year, from the original 2,000 yuan to a few hundred yuan, which is more than half.”
As early as 2012, the transportation department issued relevant regulations that vehicles over 12 tons must be equipped with Beidou driving recorders. In addition to large trucks, all other “two passengers and one danger”, that is, chartered vehicles engaged in tourism, passenger vehicles of Class 3 or higher and special vehicles for transporting hazardous chemicals, fireworks and firecrackers, and civilian explosives must also be equipped with Beidou traffic recorders.
The types of vehicles that are mandatory to install in accordance with the policy are still being further expanded, such as police cars, school buses, and official vehicles. In June last year, the Ministry of Transport revealed that the “Beidou Satellite Navigation System” was applied to more than 6.6 million road operating vehicles and 51,000 postal express delivery vehicles across the country.
The Beidou driving recorder market formed by the promotion of policies is developing very rapidly, and at the same time, it has fallen into the trap of low-price competition. The profit margins of suppliers and service providers are continuously compressed, and there is no resource and motivation to invest in it. Improve the quality of products and services.
In December last year, the Ministry of Transport announced a set of random inspection data on Beidou navigation vehicle terminals. The sampling pass rate was only 70.4%, that is, almost one of the 3 Beidou navigation devices on the market was unqualified. In the spot check, the unqualified samples are mainly in the positioning function, blind spot supplementary report function, sleep function,CAN bus data upload, route deviation reminder, etc. are defective.
A practitioner told Tiger Sniffer: “From the most primitive black box to equipment with cameras and displays, too many manufacturers of Beidou positioning equipment. In fact, the technical content involved is not high. In high-precision industries, only positioning technology has technical content. Low-precision locators are very cheap. In addition, there are cameras with equipment whose technical content is mainly in video surveillance and algorithms.”
Because of the low technical threshold, there are many players entering the Beidou driving recorder market, and there are many players. Most of the suppliers just rely on the channel and sales advantages to barely make it. A person who operates Beidou in-vehicle equipment in Guangxi also publicly stated: “At present, there are about 30-40 enterprise-level satellite positioning platforms that can be registered in the Guangxi transportation management department to carry out business, and the price war can fly. My company At present, relying on the quality of service and collecting humble service fees, it is on the verge of begging.”
From the perspective of traffic supervision, the policy mandates that operating vehicles install Beidou equipment, mainly to control the driving time of drivers and prevent fatigue driving. For example, large truck drivers must drive for 4 hours and rest for at least 20 minutes. Therefore, Beidou equipment can not only effectively reduce the occurrence of major traffic accidents, but also assist relevant departments in monitoring and dispatching transportation.
From an industry perspective, the rapid rise of a sub-industry is driven by the mandatory regulations of policies. If it is estimated based on the data of 6.6 million operating vehicles and calculated at the basic price of 800 yuan per unit (including one-year service fee), the market size will be nearly 5 billion yuan. In fact, operators will also charge a certain monthly service fee, plus an estimated 1 million new vehicles each year, which creates a new market of nearly 10 billion yuan.
As this market segment gradually becomes saturated and growth slows down, the problems left over from the past gradually begin to appear. It is a pity that almost all the evil consequences are paid by the final consumers, that is, the driver group tearfully. The Jin Deqiang incident may be a major outbreak of the driver community in an environment of “poor product service experience and non-standard charges” for a long time.
The charging standard is too broad
Although there are unified standards for “Beidou equipment” across the country, there are still many differences in actual implementation in various regions. According to media reports, some truck manufacturers will pre-install the “Beidou equipment” when their vehicles leave the factory. However, if drivers in certain areas want to obtain a license plate, they need to dismantle the “original dash cam and replace it with the relevant department.” Specified products”.
The installation nodes, product selection, and payment standards of the “Beidou Equipment” on the drivers’ cars in different regions are different. Especially in terms of price, the cost of the equipment itself is not high, but the pricing can range from a few hundred to thousands of yuan, and the monthly service fees are also different.
According to the netizen information collected by the card friend zone, we can see one or two. For example, Big Brother Zhang in Qingdao paid 3200 yuan when installing Beidou equipment, and an additional service fee of 300 yuan was required each year; Big Brother Liu in Hubei was a company because he was a company. For legal persons, the service fee for Beidou equipment is only 300 yuan per vehicle per year, and 600-800 yuan is required under normal circumstances. There is also Brother Li from Texas. The service fee for Beidou equipment has plummeted from RMB 3,000 a year to RMB 450 today.
Wang Jinwu, who has been running cargo transportation for a long time, once visited a manufacturer of navigation recorders in Shenzhen and found that the cost was only a few hundred yuan. However, in the market, the price of Beidou traffic recorders for 2G networks is around 200-400 yuan. 4G network equipment, with the addition of face recognition and monitoring functions, can be sold for about 5,000 yuan.
It’s not a big deal to pay for products with different quality and pricing levels. The biggest headache for drivers is that the fines are too broad. General supervision units will inspect the “Beidou equipment” on the vehicle in accordance with the “Measures for the Supervision and Management of Road Transport Vehicle Dynamics”, but the “Administrative Measures” only stipulate the amount of fines for two situations.
One is that when a road transport operator uses a satellite positioning device that fails to maintain an online transport vehicle to engage in business activities, the road transport management agency at or above the county level shall order it to make corrections. Those who refuse to make corrections shall be fined 800 yuan.
Another situation is the destruction of satellite positioning devices and malicious interference and shielding of satellite positioning device signals; forgery, tampering, or deletion of vehicle dynamic monitoring data, in any of the above situations, shall be managed by road transportation at or above the county level The agency ordered corrections and imposed a fine of not less than 2,000 yuan but not more than 5,000 yuan.
For the truck driver community, life pressure is increasing. These fines are like notTime bombs may cause oneself to face collapse at any time. From 1998 to 2018, if the truck driver’s survival situation took a roller coaster ride, before and after 2007, their income was not low, and their monthly income was as high as tens of thousands of yuan. However, 10 years later, their income was shrinking and their workload was increasing. Doubled.
From some data, we can see the work pressure of truck drivers. According to data from the Ministry of Transport, the number of trucks in my country in 2019 decreased by 19.8% year-on-year, but their tonnage increased by 5.5%. In other words, trucks are becoming “big trucks”, and each truck has to be responsible for more transportation tasks. There are about 30 million truck drivers in the country. They bear 78.22% of the total annual road freight, but the death rate is 5 times that of normal people, second only to miners.
In the case of Jin Deqiang, there are no specific investigation results on whether the charging standards are compliant or the quality of Beidou equipment. However, according to the analysis of multi-media and experts, there may be four cases of “Beidou offline”. Kind of reason——
First, the product manufacturer’s production quality is not good enough, and it is prone to failure; second, the product operator’s network platform is not stable enough, such as downtime, data loss, etc.; second, the network operator’s problem, the equipment’s communication signal Unstable transmission can also easily cause the equipment to fail to operate normally; the last is human reasons, such as the driver’s improper use of the product and the wire interface falls off, and sometimes the driver wants to do some private work, and will simply and rudely shut down the device.
In the end, regardless of the final outcome of the Jin Deqiang incident, one thing is certain. For Jin Deqiang’s family, it is unlikely that there will be spiritual and material compensation.
Lawyer Xia Hailong from Shanghai Shenlun Law Firm told Hu Xiu: “According to the current public information, from a legal point of view, there is no legal causality between Jin Deqiang’s suicide and the fines imposed by law enforcement agencies. Therefore, this It can only be regarded as a huge social tragedy and cannot be directly blamed on other parties. Even if it is finally found that Jin Deqiang’s equipment was dropped due to product quality defects, it can only apply for the cancellation of the 2000 yuan fine, and the equipment supplier will follow the product contract For compensation or maintenance, there is no causal relationship between the breach of the equipment purchase contract and the death of Jin Deqiang.”
Since the Jin Deqiang incident has been fermented, the scope involved has long gone beyond sympathy for him and legal accountability, involving the interests of more groups, including truck drivers, relevant law enforcement personnel, Beidou equipment suppliers, etc. The Beidou equipment industry in China is even related to the situation that each of us may face-when we are subjected to extreme injustice, how should we find a way out? This answer requires a long period of exploration and waiting, but at least raising questions and questions is an improvement.