Delimobil vs Yandex.Drive: whether taxi prices to change in Kazan

Delimobil in Kazan

Delimobil carsharing, created by Italian businessman Vincenzo Trani in 2015, is quite well known to Russian motorists. Over six years since its foundation, the service has managed to cover about a dozen cities with its services. According to the company, Delimobil initially opened in Moscow, St. Petersburg, Ufa and Nizhny Novgorod, and then, after the acquisition of the car-sharing player, it added Yekaterinburg, Tula, Samara, Grozny, Novosibirsk, Krasnodar, Rostov-on-Don, and Krasnoyarsk to its zone of presence. For a long time, Kazan did not fall into the coverage area of the operator, remaining, apparently, on the periphery of the competition between the main players.

Currently, there are 15,000 vehicles in the Delimobil fleet. As indicated on the company's website, among them, there are the affordable brands Polo, Solaris, Rio, X-Line and compact MINI Cooper, Fiat, Smart. In the higher price segment — Qashqai, Audi Q3, A3, Kia Sportage, Octavia, BMW 320i, and Mercedes-Benz E200, GLC can be operated without car wrapping, the operator notes.

Basic fare — 8,77 rubles/min of movement

Motorists have access to minute, hour, and day fares and travel passes.

“The basic fare is 8,77 rubles/min of movement and 3,35 rubles per minute of downtime," said the representative of the Federation of Car Owners of Russia, Dmitry Zolotov. “There is also a fixed travel pass, when the system itself 'counts' the cost of travel on the specified route.”

The cost of the daily rate of Delimobil in Moscow is from 2,900 to 3,500 rubles (the package includes up to 150 km of mileage). As a rule, one can move within the same city, but there are also transit options. So, for example, leaving Tolyatti, one can get to Kazan.

Now the largest car-sharing service in Kazan is Yandex.Drive. According to the company, it has 440 vehicles in the city.

“In almost two years since the launch of the service, Kazan users have made about two million trips. In the last six months, the average number of trips a day was 2,700 on weekdays and 3,000 on weekends," the Yandex press service told Realnoe Vremya. The Drive provides rental cars of various types: economy, comfort and business class passenger cars, minivans for transporting people and cargo vans. The typical “working day” of each type of machine looks different. For example, an economy class car is on the move for an average of 3 hours and 50 minutes, and comfort and business class cars — 5 hours and 20 minutes.

The Russian company is developing another car service in Kazan — Yandex.Go, developed around taxis.

Coming of Delimobil will adjust the price policy of taxi

With the coming of Delimobil, taxi market participants will have to adjust the cost of the trip, focusing on the basic car-sharing rates, Zolotov believes. First of all, this will affect the Yandex services alliance, which will have to restructure the pricing policy.

According to him, now the Yandex taxi service has approximately equal prices with car-sharing services due to a marketing campaign (they introduced pluses).

“Car-sharing will greatly 'sink' the taxi system in terms of pricing, because car-sharing services cost twice as much in terms of travel time," said Zolotov. According to him, the benchmark will be the basic tariff of 8,77 rubles per minute of movement and 3,55 rubles per minute of downtime. “Taxi will now be based on the cost of car sharing. Coming of Delimobil will adjust the price policy of taxi Of course, they can “conspire” and raise prices, but not higher than in Moscow.”

Maxim outpaces carsharing

Zolotov said that he himself moves by carsharing cars in Nizhny Novgorod, Yekaterinburg and St. Petersburg, while trips are twice cheaper than by taxi. The latter, according to him, is convenient only when you go to one point, for example, to the airport: “I went out and left the taxi. But when it is necessary to move to several points, it is more profitable to use carsharing," he believes. There are also other advantages. “First, it is more convenient for people to use carsharing, because you can drive to work and leave the car and not pay for parking. Second, it is more profitable in terms of service — you do not spend on gasoline, on maintenance. Carsharing frees you from these problems.”

At the request of Realnoe Vremya, the interlocutor of the publication compared the hypothetical fare for car sharing Delimobil and from Yandex.Taxi. The route from Salavat Kupere to Kremlevskaya 1 was taken. The journey time is 29 minutes (without traffic jams). In this case, the cost of car-sharing cost 254 rubles, and taxi — 288 rubles. In a word, the difference is insignificant.

The expert reminded that unlike taxi passengers, car-sharing clients must have a driver's license, and they will have to learn how to drive an unfamiliar car, look for parking, and these are not the easiest things to do. Besides, car-sharing users are financially responsible for the car taken. Taxis are more familiar to people.

The price of car sharing will not be significantly cheaper than a taxi, because it does not cancel the cost of maintenance and control of transport. If electric cars were used in carsharing, this could be a plus for the participants, but not for conventional fuel.

It should be noted that at the end of 2020, the company Carsharing Russia got a turnover of 5,3 billion rubles, but received a loss of 2,42 billion rubles. The service suffered due to coronavirus restrictions, when a ban was imposed on the use of car-sharing cars in Moscow and St. Petersburg. According to CloudPayments payment service, the average check in June 2019 was 192 rubles, and in 2020 it increased to 313 rubles. According to experts, this pushed the operator to promote in the regions.