Why are more and more car owners giving up ride-hailing and preferring to drive alone?

·The Car Isn't Suitable for Ride-Hailing
·Low Earnings; for a Gas Car, Ride-Hailing at Most Offsets Some Fuel Costs

★ The Car Isn't Suitable for Ride-Hailing

I wonder if more and more car owners are giving up on ride-hailing. For me personally, it's because my car isn't suitable.

I drive a pure electric vehicle, and it's an old model from ten years ago. Its range wasn't great to begin with, and now it only has about 150 kilometers of range left. As for charging speed, it's completely incomparable to new models nowadays.

If an EV wants to make money through ride-hailing, it needs to cover more mileage, which places high demands on range and charging speed. For my ten-year-old EV, this is simply beyond its capability.

When using it myself, I can manage and don't mind waiting. But asking ride-hailing passengers to wait while the car charges is really inappropriate. Moreover, it could easily lead to misunderstandings, with people thinking that EVs have such poor performance and that the range and charging experience are terrible. Would I then have to take the initiative to explain everything?

So, for an owner of a ten-year-old EV like me, after trying ride-hailing once or twice, I completely gave up on the idea.

★ The Earnings from Ride-Hailing Are Really Low

I've also proactively driven for ride-hailing platforms before, specifically to make money, not just when I was already going that way. For an EV, after deducting the cost of off-peak electricity, you might earn about 10 yuan per hour. The effort involved is completely disproportionate to the income (though it's still more than writing for Zhihu). My feeling back then was that having a regular job pays much better.

I've also seen some related reports on this topic.

It's said that due to consumption downgrading, various platforms have lowered prices to attract customers, but this definitely affects the drivers' interests! For example, ride-hailing pricing is now calculated based on the passenger's start and end points, without considering whether the driver needs to detour for pick-up or drop-off. So, facing these low-price orders, drivers would rather drive empty than take detours to pick up passengers, resulting in many orders not being accepted.

In March 2025, there was a report about a ride-hailing order for 434 kilometers, where the driver only received 87 yuan in gross income. Calculated, this long-distance cross-province order earned only 0.2 yuan per kilometer. Even for an EV, you can't operate like this! Ironic enough, the courier fee for the same distance was as high as 300 yuan, about 3.45 times the revenue from carrying a person in a ride-hailing service. This shows that goods are valued more than people!

At the same time, places like Guangdong have started to strengthen management over ride-hailing services, explicitly stating that online ride-hailing drivers cannot accept ride-hailing orders. Some places even clearly stipulate that drivers cannot take more than 3 ride-hailing orders per day (the Gaode ride-hailing service I use is exactly like this, limited to 3 orders a day), otherwise, they will be penalized for illegal operation. This further reduces the capacity in the ride-hailing market and will certainly filter out some professional drivers who specialize in it.

These professional drivers used to be able to use multiple accounts to select customers and then have passengers transfer to one car, effectively creating a pooled ride with a single car to increase earnings.

I once took a ride-hailing service to the airport and encountered this situation. The driver told me that a car with a certain license plate would stop by to pick me up, and I could just get in directly.

In cases like this, it's usually a couple operating together – one handles the dispatching (booking, accepting, and matching orders online), and the other does the driving. But this was more common when ride-hailing was first introduced. I believe that with such low fares now, no one should be working as a professional ride-hailing driver anymore.

I just checked Gaode ride-hailing again. Over 20 kilometers for over 20 yuan – it looks okay. However, the destination is too remote, so it's probably not suitable for professional drivers either. 😊