This article comes from WeChat public account: half Buddha immortal (ID: banfoSB) , of: semi Buddha immortal
I wrote an article about the logical dismantling of the ride-hailing business not long ago. At that time, many friends left a message asking me to talk about the car-sharing business.
There is a saying, there are indeed a large number of users who can find their own cost-effective (Of course, time is appropriately sacrificed, because the friends will detour, this look Personal preference) , and you can get to the car more quickly during peak times.
In my opinion, the car-sharing business is a relatively perfect sharing economy model. The whole process is monitored, seat-by-seat, and one-stop prices, taking into account the balance between efficiency, cost and safety.
toB service, toC price.
Last year, I had a minor accident, and my shoulder was broken. During the injury period, I used carpooling for a long time. Fast, basic carpooling experience = fast train, and it is easy to get to the car in the morning and evening) , and talked with the driver about a lot of carpool-related topics.
As a C-end customer, I’m satisfied with the ride-sharing itself.
But as a driver on the supply side, there are criticisms about carpooling. He watched several passengers pay, but he only made income from express trains and felt that he was losing money.
Passengers feel good, and drivers feel loss. There are actually many things to say about it.
1
Let’s start with the business itself.
The logic of carpooling is to change the service goods provided by drivers to passengers directly from “vehicles” to “seats”.
It’s a bit like selling and charging for public transport.
Public transportation, such as buses, subways, buses, passes on fixed routesDriving on the road allows many different people to share the capacity of the same vehicle, thereby reducing costs.
The difference is that public transportation has a fixed route, and people are looking for cars. The taxi route is not fixed.
The process of finding people by car will cause many problems, such as detours, such as time cost, so people have their own opinions on carpooling.
I once experienced the wildness of taxi carpooling in a small city. I told the master that I was in a hurry. The master said, rest assured, I will definitely give you a clear and straightforward, and then happy to carpool all the way.
Real human carpool, stop with a wave of your hand. No matter where others say they go, the master doesn’t say it’s not going well.
I was sitting in the co-pilot, and I was foolishly watching the people coming and going in the back seat. The airport is less than 50 kilometers from the city, just seven in and seven out.
Zhao Zilong did the same thing in Changbanpo.
This experience has always had a shadow on carpooling.
Fortunately, the Internet’s transformation of traditional formats is huge. Car-hailing based on big data system and supply and demand forecasting system has become the basis for carpooling.
But the problem still exists. The root problem is from driving a car to hitting a seat. These are totally two ways of thinking.
Make a very simple math problem. With the same travel demand, if you combine the travel needs of all passengers in pairs, only half of the cars on the road can be met. If three or three can be combined, only one third of the current vehicle will be needed.
This is a very magical thing. The solution to the problem of urban congestion is not necessarily to build more roads or control the number of cars.
The effect of doubling the road is the same as letting two passengers fight for a car, but the latter has lower cost, higher efficiency and faster speed.
The essence of carpooling is not so simple as taking one more person when driving a car, but the efficient integration of system memory resources.
During the integration process, due to the third party platform, new contradictions have emerged.
For the past four years, both passengers and drivers have complained about the drops that contributed to carpooling.
Some of the problems are due to the immature nature of the business, such as the need to detour when connecting friends, such as carpooling is not much cheaper than express trains.
Some of these contradictions are due to the technology at the timeImperfect capabilities, some are problematic in pricing rules, and services and prices are not equal.
Drivers love and hate the carpool business.
What I love is that it is easier to receive the list, but I hate that I have got more money. ) , but I did n’t get a few times more money. I had to pick up a few people and get a few dollars to be fair.
I do n’t say who is right and who is wrong, I just think that this logical conflict is actually very interesting.
2
A while ago, Didi announced the new features and discount strategies of carpooling, and also announced some core business logic of carpooling, using a lot of formulas to explain why it has changed.
In the past, as long as the user chose a carpool, regardless of whether or not the carpooling was eventually completed, it was a flat car price.
Ab mode is now available.
In case A, the core demand of the user is to start quickly, accept carpooling (carpooling is not 100%, which is unrealistic), and accept the full cost of express trains if the carpooling is not successful. If it is successfully assembled in the process of travel, it is calculated according to the price of carpooling. Failure to fight is a normal express.
A mode appears directly on the express page. Check to accept carpooling.
In case B, the core demand of the user is cost-effectiveness, accepting carpooling, accepting their own needs, etc., but not accepting the price of express trains, then you need to wait and wait for the people who are on the way to make the order.
B mode appears on the carpool page, and on the carpool pagePlace an order.
Did you find it? Although it is a carpool, the starting and ending points are the same (Santan Yinyue to East Station) , but the price of the AB model is different B is much cheaper than A.
Because A is essentially fast + random carpooling; B is essentially carpooling but planning (not real time) .
Suppose the user is anxious and can choose carpooling under the express; if you are not in a hurry, you want to get a more affordable price. You can place a carpooling order in advance through the carpooling independent entrance.
This change is very interesting. This involves product pricing logic, profit logic, supply and demand balance, and even the company’s value trade-off. It is also to solve the problem of driver dissatisfaction.
This is not a simple question of right or wrong, but a question of economics. The problems of economics don’t stand in line, you can use mathematics to explain them.
3
The supply and demand balancing, route planning, and price calculations behind the changes are interesting.
For the change of the pricing rules, Didi gave a lot of conditions for solving the problem. Regarding the contradiction between the driver and the platform, I tried to find a solution by doing a mathematical problem.
The first question is a judgment question. The driver thinks that pulling a car does more work, but does not make money. Didi said that drivers earn more by receiving carpool orders than by only express orders.
Who is right?
The answer to this question is relatively simple, probably the level of a primary school application question.
Let’s list a formula to show Didi’s driver’s income logic. We can roughly get the following formula:
Net income
= Receipt unit time income × Order time-other costs + reward
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= Receipt unit time income × total travel time × (1- empty driving rate)-other costs + rewards
First popularize a concept, empty driving rate.
Idle rate refers to (Total Travel Time-Order Time) / Total Travel Time.
According to the net income formula above, the larger this ratio, the lower the driver’s income, and the less they are reluctant to use sports cars.
Because for the driver, empty driving is a very painful state. No one gives money, but it still burns fuel. There are costs and no gains. Every extra second of empty driving is paying one second of money.
Before the advent of online booking, a driver was constantly searching for passengers on the road. At that time, about 30% of the time he was driving in the air.
On the other hand, the online booking allows the driver to directly pick up the passengers in need, which reduces the empty driving rate.
Carpooling is the second logic to reduce the idle rate. It makes the end-to-start time between each order more compact, and further reduces the idle rate.
Compared with drivers who only take express trains, drivers who take both express and carpooling can get higher income, not only because of the decrease in empty driving rate, but also because of two things-
First, rewards increase.
Didi will set up a driver ’s prize for the morning peak. Although there are many orders in the morning peak, the road is annoying. If I ’m a driver, I ’m better off worrying about driving on the road. Sleeping on the bed.
So Didi has to subsidize drivers to give them motivation to work.
In a unit of time, or in the same mileage, carpooling can share a part of the mileage, which is equivalent to the time that a driver can complete an order to complete two or even three orders. This allows the carpooling driver Get more exit rewards.
From the perspective of economics, the more the driver gets out of the car, the more the passenger ’s interest will actually increase.
This logical chain is actually very clear, that is, the relationship between supply and demand.
The more rewards a driver has, the more willing he is to provide service, and the easier it is for passengers to get in the car. The core needs of passengers are, of course, hit the car.
In addition to the platform’s subsidies, both drivers and passengers can benefit.
span> At the same time, these two people, or these three people, are the same starting point and the same ending point.
The American drama “The Big Bang” once told a joke: a farmer found that his chicken was no longer laying eggs, so he asked a physicist to help. The physicist did a calculation and announced that I had found a solution! But this solution is only valid for spherical chickens in vacuum farms.
The chicken in reality is not spherical and does not live in a vacuum. In reality, carpooling rarely starts in the same place.
To answer this question, I opened the sealed junior high school textbook for many years, and used the potential skills of the soul painter to draw a schematic diagram like the one above.
Suppose A and B are going to take a taxi. The journey of A is from A1 to A2, and the journey of B is from B1 to B2.
The two of them joined together and became a pair of friends. We start from this condition to solve the problem.
To be more rigorous, we set data for each distance, such as line segment A1A2 = 5, line segment B1B2 = 3, line segment A3B1 = 1, line segment B2A4 = 1
Just want to skip the conclusions:
Didi ’s revenue
= Expense paid by A + Expense paid by B-Income earned by the driver
= A’s estimated cost X70% + B’s estimated cost X70% -the driver’s income
= A’s (starting price + mileage fee + duration fee) X70% + B’s (starting price + mileage fee + duration fee) X70%-(driver’s starting income + mileage charging + duration charging + Reward)
In this formula, the variables that affect passenger payments and driver income are mainly time and mileage. We can even simplify it a bit.
Because road congestion will increase the amount of time that Didi pays to drivers, but passengers will pay for it and the payment will not be affected. Therefore, Didi’s revenue-friendly road conditions are consistent with the estimated situation: because the income is unchanged, the money paid is also the same as estimated.
For the convenience of calculation, we simplified the driving speed of the driver on the distance s to a uniform speed of t in the total time. In this case, the time t = s / v becomes the total mileage. A function of s.
This means that both duration and mileage fees can be expressed in miles.
Next, we take mileage as the standard. Assume that for each mileage of the car, the passenger pays 1 mileage, and the driver’s income is 1 mileage.
In this way, the cost of the two passengers is 5X70% + 3X70%, which is about 5.6 miles.
How much do drivers earn? It is based on real-time pricing throughout the journey, from A1-A3-B1-B2-A4-A2, a total of 1 + 1 + 3 + 1 + 1 = 7 miles of income.
Let’s introduce another formula:
Didi’s commission rate = (passenger payment-driver income) / passenger payment fee
In ordinary express trains, because the passenger and driver are charged in real time, the ratio of the mileage to mileage factor is 1: 1, but in this case it is 5.6: 7.
If you substitute the ratio of these two coefficients back to the formula, you will find that in the case of carpooling, the drop rate of Didi actually decreases.
Conclusion: In this abstract example, Didi did not imagine making black money through carpooling, and even the percentage rate declined slightly. How can this be explained?
There are three factors.
The first factor is that Didi now offers a very low discount on carpooling to passengers who have been assembled. Checking the carpool is almost 70% off, and the current departure is 50% off.
I used to get a 30% discount on carpooling. I need to spend money every week to buy coupons, and they can only be used on fixed routes. Discounted prices are now more common.
I can give such a low discount because of the changes in the discount strategy mentioned above.
The previous Didi carpooling mode is that as long as you choose a carpool, the price will be unified, regardless of whether you have a carpool friend.
This method of making money by the local boss actually makes the subsidy very inefficient: those who have n’t put together do n’t share the resources, but get a discounted price; Motivation of carpooling.
After the adjustment, the discount is only available after the spelling. Didi saves the money of invalid subsidy, the subsidy is very targeted, and the discount rate can be increased.
But Didi can completely cover the saved invalid subsidies in their own money bags, so why are they willing to give passengers a low discount?
From the motivation, in order to increase revenue, Didi can use two methods. One is not to give users such a low carpool discount, and to make more money from a single user, and the other is to attract more through lower discounts. Of passengers are carpooling, so that the car is filled with three people as much as possible.
The second one is drip-dipping, which is obviously more reasonable.
Because the platform can not only increase income, but also ease the difficulty of taxi rides during the peak period, improve the experience, drivers can complete more orders, passengers can pay less, and all three parties can benefit.
As a platform, we should try our best to make everyone win-win. Unilaterally please one party’s results, and ultimately no one can please them.
Let ’s go back to the second factor that caused the reduction in percentage. That is not always two or three passengers on board. Looking at the diagram above, Didi only received the money of two passengers in the B1B2 segment, and on the other journeys, only one person’s money was collected, and this money was still discounted.
For an extreme example, when you took a taxi from Shanghai to Hangzhou, you did find a friend, but that friend went from the east gate of their neighborhood to the west gate of their neighborhood.
Didi’s journey to collect double money is particularly short, and you enjoy a 30% discount over the entire 180 kilometers, Didi’s loss is large.
So back to the above, Didi’s low discount is for more people to use carpooling, so that the time for two or three people on the car is extended.
The third factor is that the pricing system for drivers and passengers is completely separated. When carpooling is billed, the fare for passengers is calculated according to the best route for the express route alone. The rain part of the road has no melon.
But when connecting friends, the road conditions cannot always be perfect, then there will be detours, and the detours will be charged by the driver.
Simply speaking, passengers do n’t pay when detouring, but the driver still collects money. This part of the detour is subsidized by money.
After understanding this logic, the situation is actually very obvious. The farther the driver detours, the less the platform earns.
Combined with the second factor, the best scenario for Didi is the vacuum spherical chicken that we described earlier that is basically impossible to achieve: the starting points of several friends are exactly the same.
In order to increase income, Didi has the motivation to make drivers detour less. From this perspective, it is actually unreasonable to accuse Didi of intentionally detouring, because intentionally detouring harms others.
Business behavior depends more on the distribution of benefits.
Of course, the above analysis is not to say that Didi Carpool does not make money, and who does not make money.
What we have calculated above is just the case of two people joining together and simplifying a lot of conditions. As long as more people can be joined together, a longer mileage can be shared between passengers, so that there are two people in the car. Even if the time of three people is longer, and a more reasonable route is planned at the same time, Didi’s economic benefits will be greatly improved. This is due to the efficiency improvement brought by technology.
To put it plainly, the better the algorithm, the higher the efficiency and the more money you can make.
5
During a normal taxi ride, the amount of money is limited.
The driver gets the money from the passenger.
The more money the driver gets, the more money passengers need to pay. Passengers wanting to save money means less money for drivers. This is a zero-sum game.
In the zero-sum game, there is actually no so-called equilibrium strategy, and the contradictions between the two sides are irreconcilable.