Chinese first self driving transportation service

Chinese B2C public transportation company, DiDi, also known as Uber China, published its new service of self-driving for Shanghai region yesterday. This can be seen as another step DiDi takes to expand its business model to other aspects within transportation industry.

Years ago, DiDi has already established its high level transportation business for premium passengers. Instead of asking drivers to own cars, DiDi bought thousands of mid-level above cars and hired large quantity of professional drivers, with the purpose of providing unique and comfortable service for clients. Even the cost is relatively higher than normal ones, it still becomes one of the most popular model in the society. This ‘premium’ service completely broke the car sharing model which has been built by companies like Uber from all over the world, and turned back to traditional pattern. However, according to the reaction of market, it’s not a bad idea.

And now, DiDi expanded another door for its transportation business, and made the company more like a mixture giant instead of a tech company. Without doubt, self-driving cars are owned by DiDi itself and to ensure the security of operation, DiDi hired another thousands of supervisors who will stay in self-driving cars for days to keep an eye on any possible accidents.

This is a big amount of investment, but for DiDi’s blueprint, it’s worthwhile. Nowadays, people in china will most likely use DiDi service for different kinds of transportation demands, such as public transportation, business, car rental and so on. DiDi plans to fit itself in every corner of the industry and so far DiDi handles it very well.

It’s hard to tell how the self-driving transportation business goes, as it’s more expensive, a bit risky and controlled by a strict official regulation. But based on the popularity, it’s just time issue when the service covers all large cities in China. And we will see how it goes after then.