The other big problem facing China’s ridesharing apps

The Chinese ridesharing app market is hot and getting hotter, despite the potential pending regulatory issues. But there may be another danger lying in wait for China’s ridesharing app services: lax training standards.

According to a report in China Youth Daily, complaints about drivers are on the rise in China, with ‘lack of driving skills’ and ‘lack of geographical knowledge’ chief among customer concerns. The cause of the drop in service quality may well be driver training, or rather a lack thereof.

As China’s ridesharing apps push to expand quickly, they need to recruit large numbers of new drivers in cities all across the country. And while the big apps like Kuaidi Dache and Didi Dache released a stringent set of rules for training last month, the report suggests they aren’t always being followed. The paper reports that some drivers are hired without any kind of interview or training, and for others, the process is very lax. One driver applicant – it’s not clear for which particular service – told reporters that during his interview, he was only asked five geographical questions, and vaguely-right answers were good enough. When he was asked where Xiangshan (a park in Beijing) was, he replied “the western suburbs,” and that was enough for him to pass.

Reporters also found that some places offered their driver training online, not ever even meeting with drivers in person.

It’s not clear from China Youth Daily‘s report which services are the worst offenders when it comes to lax training, but the failure to thoroughly vet drivers by any service could put the entire industry in danger of attracting a regulatory smackdown. Uber learned that lesson the hard way in India after its failure to properly background-check a driver led to a passenger being raped, and a subsequent ban on Uber in Delhi. Any Chinese company that’s cutting corners in recruitment and training is putting itself at risk of creating a similar tragedy, whether it be by hiring someone with a criminal background or by hiring someone who simply isn’t a competent enough driver.

The latter may be a particular problem because China’s driver training programs are not great, and possession of a drivers license does not necessarily indicate driving competence. Most driver training schools in China don’t include any driving practice on real roads – drivers practice their moves on closed tracks built specifically for training. When they get their licenses, they have to learn how to deal with China’s congested and chaotic real-world traffic on their own, and the results aren’t always pretty: China has about ten times as many road fatalities per car as the United States.

All of this is to say that although the regulatory battle seems like the biggest threat facing China’s ridesharing industry, it also has to be very careful about policing itself. One high-profile tragedy on the scale of Uber’s India failure could destroy consumer trust and take down an entire company. Or it could attract enough regulatory heat to threaten the entire industry. The major players have already recognized the need for strict and universal standards for driver recruitment and training, but implementing them effectively across the Middle Kingdom may be a difficult fight.