Author丨Angie Li
Edited by Su Jianxun
36氪 was informed that recently, the shared travel platform Wandou Carpooling received a three million angel round of financing, and this round of financing was exclusively invested by “Chelai”.
Founded in 2020, Pea Carpooling is a start-up company focusing on the ride-hailing business. Its founder, Zhang Dongsheng, used to be the senior product manager of Tencent Qzone, the head of Didi’s special car operations, and the vice president of products for Chelai.
Although the shared travel industry has been developing for many years, Zhang Dongsheng, CEO of Peadou Carpooling, still said that there are still some travel needs in the market that have not been met, especially the needs of commuters around the first-tier cities in Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou and Shenzhen.
Zhang Dongsheng told 36氪: The number of commuters in the suburbs around Beijing exceeds 2 million. “The typical portrait of them is that they are people from other places, they are of a certain age, but they cannot settle down and buy a house in the center of the city, so they can only keep going to the outer edge of the big city.”
Taking Beijing as an example, because the subway is inconvenient and the bus time is long, the commuting journey of working people in Langfang, Yanjiao and other places is relatively long, and it often takes one or two hours to reach the urban area. A hitchhiker may be a good choice, but it’s not cheap at the price of a rideshare commute on the market.
Zhang Dongsheng told 36氪: At present, the ride-hailing/carpooling on the market is mainly divided into several platform modes:
The first is carpool travel on the Didi platform, which is based on full-time capacity and provides highly customized travel services, but the one-way price is 1.5-2 yuan/km, which is more for short-distance commuting scenarios in the city.
The second is the ride-hailing platforms such as Dida and Hello, which mainly focus on part-time transportation capacity to increase income, and provide users with cost-effective, online car-hailing-like door-to-door pick-up and drop-off services. The one-way price is 1.2-1.5 yuan/km. Short- and medium-distance travel, long-distance travel across cities.
Peadou carpooling is based on the mutual assistance between neighbors, mainly in the mode of cost sharing and capacity sharing. The car owner does not provide door-to-door pickup. Passengers can get on and off the car on the owner’s commuting route. The one-way price is 0.4-0.6 yuan/km , suitable for long-distance commuting and long-distance travel across cities.
Taking the Beijing city area to Langfang Station as an example, the one-way mileage is nearly 50 kilometers. The price of Didi Express is about 160 yuan, the price of Didi hitchhiker is about 60 yuan, and the price of Hello hitchhiker is also about 60 yuan. The price is negotiated by the owner and the passenger, and the upper limit is 20 yuan.
Zhang Dongsheng believes that rideshares are more attractive to part-time, money-oriented drivers, but the real rideshare travel should be a high degree of matching between the owner’s travel willingness and the passenger’s travel route, and it can neither delay the owner’s commute time. Make it affordable for passengers.
“The practice of Pea Carpooling may filter out the group of hitchhikers for the purpose of making money, but it can return the hitchhikers to their purest form.”
Zhang Dongsheng told 36氪 that before the appearance of the Peadou carpooling model, many private carpooling groups commuting across cities were already doing similar things. Many commuting hitchhiker drivers do not actually make money for full-time jobs. Most of them just want to share the fuel bill with the passengers. However, if the mainstream hitchhiker mode is adopted in the market, the car owner still needs to take a detour to send the passenger, which will delay the car owner’s commute time to a certain extent. .
At present, Peadou Carpool is mainly operated in the form of WeChat mini-programs. The cities that are open for trial operation are mainly in Beijing, covering the urban area of Langfang, Yanjiao, Langfang University Town, Yizhuang and other areas. The number of registered users reaches 130,000, and the daily travel orders can reach thousands.
As for the charging model, Zhang Dongsheng said that in order to provide users with more professional services, a service fee of 0.5 yuan per order has been charged in some areas to purchase personal accident insurance and provide exclusive customer service for passengers and car owners.
Zhang Dongsheng said that although the unit price of passengers is not high, the frequency of commuting in the outer suburbs will be higher than that of ordinary rides. Passengers use the platform 3-5 times a week.
At the same time, Pea Carpool has also been connected to the “Chelai” platform. “Chelai” is a real-time public transportation information service platform in China. It currently has 140 million users and more than 30 million monthly active users.
Zhang Dongsheng said that bus users and Wandou carpool users have a certain degree of overlap, and the two platforms have synergistic effects. In addition, in April 2022, Wandou Carpooling also established an in-depth service cooperation with Country Garden Services, a domestic property service company, to provide convenient services for community residents’ cross-city commuting and other travel.
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36Kr Startup State Sprout Investment Circle
Related events
- Wandou Carpooling received 3 million angel round financing, Chelai ‘s exclusive investment2022-06-10
- Didi announced that the average daily orders for carpooling exceeded 2.4 million, covering 60 cities across the country2018-04-02
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