Today morning, I booked an Ola Auto from my place to the office. The app showed the ride was three minutes away. I waited almost a minute and did not find him at my location. While tracking, I got to know he hadn’t moved at all from his initial position. So, I gave him a call to know his whereabouts. He told me his net pack finished, that’s why I am unable to track him; he is right below my building. I rushed down and saw there was no auto. Again, I called him and asked his location, he said his phone is broken and hence could not navigate to my location. He gave me his location two minutes away from my gate, and since he was two minutes away, I thought I would walk up to his location. He still was not there; I cancelled my ride and I was charged for cancelling my drive. In this entire process, I wasted 40 minutes and got bullied by Ola and the driver.
Let us take another scenario if you wanna go to place A from B. A is a hugely populated area where the frequency of getting a ride is high and B is the lesser one. As soon as you book a cab, They ( Ola or Uber drivers) wouldn’t call or come to your place, instead, they (not all) would wait for us to call them, after that they would ask for the location where you need to go and after getting to know your location, they would cut your call saying that they would be coming but after some time they won’t come and ultimately you have no other option than cancelling the ride (obviously, you can report it to Uber or Ola but if you are going for some urgent work then those 30 minutes waiting period to reach customer executive or help desk is a task, even if you succeed in reaching them they will render an apology for the inconvenience and you have to get ready for another brutal experience.
These Ola cab drivers are not limited to cheating clients, they cheat their company too. For example, the cab driver comes to your pick-up point. As soon as you get inside the cab, he would tell you that I am going to cancel the ride, instead, you give me the same amount as displayed by Uber or Ola before booking. And now if I am in a hurry I would do it because I have to reach my destination as soon as possible. This is one example but they have their various ways of cheating people. The irony is that Ola Uber drivers demand a guaranteed monthly income of 1.5 lacs. Engineering and medico Even highly qualified degree holders don’t get this guarantee. They are not reasonable in their demands. Apart from all this, if you look at these cabs you will find Car interiors dirty as most drivers do not bother to keep them clean daily. There smells they do not bother in keeping an air freshener/fragrance to mask the foul smell. Most of the time car A/C does not work, either there is a fault with the A/C or the driver wants to save on fuel costs. Car insides are sometimes infested with mosquitoes as the drivers keep the windows open during breeding time. Nowadays many drivers do not use Google Maps navigation while driving; instead, they keep asking the passenger constantly for guiding them in the right direction, which is very much annoying.
The worst of all experiences is this one I had recently – nowadays most of the drivers are not allowed to cancel customer’s requests more than once or twice, so they employ a nasty and possibly illegal tactic to cancel a customer’s request – what they do is that as soon as they get your request, they drive for some distance till your pick up point & input in the phone app that they have already picked you up & then drive away and disappear. Once you realize this and press Cancel, you are charged with an Rs. 50/- cancellation charge, which you have to contact Customer Support and contest with them.
Moreover, drivers on behalf of partners run most of the Ola cabs, these cars are purchased on car loans for business purchase and owners of the car hardly drive these cars. About 50% of the cars operating in the city are in jeopardy of being seized by banks and other financial institutions, as most drivers are not able to service their debts, which may result in loan defaults, the pamphlet claimed. It further said that if the demands for better remuneration and improved working conditions are not met, the drivers will go on a hunger strike. The drivers alleged that their incomes have reduced drastically with the taxi-hailing firms continuing to acquire more cabs while restructuring the incentive schemes.
With no real regulation on the number of taxis on the roads, their numbers have swelled. When Uber and Ola started their services, they attracted drivers by offering them extraordinarily generous incentives and facilitating loans for cars. Attracted by the charm of owning their taxis, and blinded by the incentives, many of the drivers did not question the sustainability of the tariffs they were made to offer. Nor did they question the longevity of the incentives. Over time, with enough taxis on their apps, the companies have withdrawn most incentives. Some of the drivers will eventually have to stop playing their taxis, dashing their entrepreneurial dreams. Already, some have started defaulting on their loans, prompting some lenders to stop new loans to drivers wanting to buy cars and join the app-based taxi revolution. With the companies making losses—then, they are funded by venture capital and expected to make losses. The companies have other problems as well. The companies see their drivers as contractors. The drivers want to be considered employees. This is true in India too; so much for the whole entrepreneurship thing. In the UK, a court has ruled that Uber should recognize its drivers as employees. There are cases in other parts of the world as well. Recognizing drivers as employees would dent the much-vaunted asset-light model of these companies.
However, as the markets matured, systems for holding these companies accountable have become stronger. The cab services are gaining ground, as are pressures on these services to invest in their own infrastructure and comply with local norms. As the costs of these changes add on, the balance sheets of aggregators like Uber and Ola could start looking more and more like those of traditional players, making them potentially undifferentiated and unattractive to investors. Too big to fail: As mentioned, most aggregators run on very asset-light models. This means someone else owns the infrastructure, the people, the maintenance, the depreciation, the compliance and the domain expertise – these companies come in and hoist an app on top of it and call all of it their own. What happens if and when they choose to stop or withdraw from a market? The ecosystem that depends on demand generation and subsidies could potentially collapse.
