It is saddening to see that the truck driver Jin Deqiang committed suicide by taking poison after being fined 2,000 yuan for “Beidou dropping out” in the past few days. He was 51 years old and had been driving a truck for 10 years, earning 200-400 yuan a day, supporting a family of six, including his 70-year-old mother, three children and his wife who grew crops. In middle age, he also suffered from high morbidities, such as diabetes, heart disease, etc..
Jin Deqiang chose to give up his life is “frozen three feet is not a day of cold”, “Beidou dropped, 2,000 yuan fine” is “the last straw that crushed the camel”. Before taking poison to commit suicide, Jin Deqiang left a suicide note in the group of car enthusiasts. In the face of death, he did not show too much panic in the suicide note, but rather calm. It makes people repeatedly speculate that “I use my death to wake up the leaders to pay attention to this matter”, a bit like David Gale in the movie “The Life of David Gale”. Their situations and demands are very different, but they both chose to give up their lives to attract the brief attention of some people.
Did Jin Deqiang get “the leadership’s attention to this matter” by losing his life? We do not know, and even the change brought by this incident may be very small, but at least two issues affecting 30 million freight drivers and even more general public are brought to our attention: one is the defect of Beidou satellite positioning device products, and the second is the possible negligence of regulatory departments.
1/3 of the devices are not qualified
What we usually understand as Beidou, that is, the Beidou satellite navigation system, is different from the “Beidou equipment” installed on Jin Deqiang’s truck. The BeiDou satellite navigation system is an infrastructure that took China 26 years, invested more than $12 billion and launched 59 satellites to complete, with two major functions: navigation and positioning and data transmission.
The “Beidou device” on the truck is actually a product based on the positioning and navigation services provided by the “Beidou satellite navigation system”, which is also a kind of driving recorder. This equipment is mainly composed of the host, satellite antenna, mobile communication antenna, display and other components, and now there are some high-end equipment to join the printer, camera and other components, ranging in price from a few hundred to thousands of dollars.
Many suppliers of Beidou car recorders are mostly labeled production, with no technology patents and other intellectual property rights, as long as the product conforms to the relevant regulations and standards of the Ministry of Transport and the Ministry of Public Security. Jiang Lin, who has sold Beidou car recorders, has witnessed the market grow from nothing to something overnight as a result of the policy push – Beidou car equipment manufacturers and operators sprouted up, and “companies were involved in the low-price competition to speed up progress, and the price of the equipment was reduced several times a year, from The original 2,000 yuan fell to a few hundred yuan, shrinking by more than half.”
As early as 2012, the transportation department issued relevant regulations, more than 12 tons of vehicles must be installed Beidou car recorder. In addition to large trucks, all other “two passengers and a dangerous”, that is, engaged in tourism charter buses, three types of class buses and the transport of dangerous chemicals, fireworks, civilian explosives special vehicles must also be installed Beidou car recorder.
The types of vehicles that are mandatory to be installed under the policy are being further expanded, such as police cars, school buses and official vehicles. Last June, China’s Ministry of Transport revealed that more than 6.6 million road vehicles and 51,000 postal delivery vehicles nationwide have been installed with the Beidou satellite navigation system.
The Beidou car recorder market, driven by the policy, is developing very rapidly, but it is also caught in the trap of low-price competition, and suppliers and service providers’ profit margins are constantly being compressed, so they have no resources and incentives to invest in product and service quality improvement.
In December last year, the Chinese Ministry of Transport announced a set of sampling data on the Beidou navigation vehicle terminals, with a passing rate of only 70.4%, i.e., almost 1 out of 3 Beidou navigation devices on the market was unqualified. In the sampling, the unqualified samples were mainly defective in the positioning function, the blind area complementary reporting function, the hibernation function, CAN bus data upload, and route deviation reminder.
A practitioner said: “From the most primitive black box, to devices with cameras and displays, there are too many manufacturers doing Beidou positioning equipment. In fact, the technical content involved is not high, only in the high-precision industry, positioning technology is considered technical content, low-precision locators are very cheap, in addition to equipment with cameras, the technical content is mainly in the video monitoring and algorithms.”
Due to the low technical threshold, there are many players and mixed players entering the Beidou car recorder market, and most suppliers just rely on channels and sales advantages to barely get by. A person who operates a Beidou vehicle-mounted device in Guangxi has publicly stated, “At present, there are about 30-40 enterprise-level satellite positioning platforms that can conduct business in Guangxi’s transport department, and the price war is flying. The company I work for is currently on the verge of begging for food by relying on the quality of service and collecting humble service fees.”
From the traffic regulation level, the policy mandates the installation of Beidou devices in operating vehicles, mainly to control the driving time of drivers and prevent fatigue driving, for example, large truck drivers must drive for 4 hours on a break of at least 20 minutes. Therefore, Beidou devices are not only effective in reducing major traffic accidents, but also in assisting relevant departments in transportation monitoring and scheduling.
From the industry level, the mandatory policy has led to the rapid rise of a niche industry. If we estimate the market size based on the data of 6.6 million operating vehicles and calculate the basic price at 800 RMB/unit (including a 1-year service fee), the market size will be nearly 5 billion RMB. In fact, the operator will also charge a certain monthly service fee, plus the estimated 1 million new vehicles each year, then creating a new market of nearly 10 billion yuan.
But as this market segment gradually saturates and growth slows, the legacy problems of the past gradually begin to emerge. Unfortunately, almost all of the bad consequences, the final consumer, that is, the driver group tearfully pays. Jin Deqiang’s incident, perhaps the driver group in the long-term “poor product service experience, charges are not standard” environment a big outbreak.
The charging standard is too broad
Although China has a unified standard for “Beidou equipment”, there are still many discrepancies in the actual implementation of each region. Some media reported that some truck manufacturers would pre-install the “Beidou device” when the vehicle leaves the factory, but drivers in certain areas need to remove the “original car recorder and replace it with the product specified by the relevant department” in order to get a license.
The installation nodes, product selection, and payment standards for Beidou devices vary among drivers in different regions. Especially in terms of price, the cost of the device itself is not high, but the pricing can range from several hundred to thousands of dollars, and the monthly service fees are also different.
For example, Brother Zhang from Qingdao paid 3,200 yuan for the installation of Beidou equipment and another 300 yuan per year for the service fee; Brother Liu from Hubei paid 300 yuan per year for Beidou equipment because he is a legal person of the company, and 600-800 yuan under normal circumstances. Brother Li, a trucker from Texas, saw his Beidou equipment service fee plummet from more than 3,000 yuan per year to 450 yuan today.
Wang Jinwu, who has been running cargo transportation for a long time, once visited a manufacturer of navigation recorders in Shenzhen and found that the cost was only a few hundred yuan, but in the market, the price of Beidou driving recorders of 2G network was around 200-400 yuan, while 4G network devices, with the addition of face recognition monitoring function, could be sold for about 5,000 yuan.
For the quality layer, pricing levels of uneven products to pay for are nothing, the driver’s biggest headache or fine standards are too broad. The general supervision unit will follow the “Road Transport Vehicle Dynamic Supervision and Management Measures” to check the “Beidou equipment” on the car, but the “Management Measures” only provide for two types of fines.
One is, when the road transport operators use satellite positioning device failure to maintain online transport vehicles engaged in business activities, the road transport management agencies at the county level or above ordered to correct. Refusal to correct, a fine of 800 yuan.
Another situation is that the destruction of satellite positioning devices and malicious artificial interference, shielding satellite positioning device signal; falsification, tampering, deletion of vehicle dynamic monitoring data, one of the above circumstances, the road transport management agencies at or above the county level shall order correction, a fine of more than 2000 yuan 5000 yuan.
For the truck driver community, the increasing pressure of life, these fines are like untimely bombs, at any time may let themselves face collapse. From 1998 to 2018, the survival situation of truck drivers if riding a roller coaster, around 2007, their income is not low, monthly income up to tens of thousands of yuan, but 10 years later, their income is shrinking, the workload is doubling.
The work pressure of truck drivers can be glimpsed in some data. According to the Ministry of Transportation, the number of cargo vehicles in China fell by 19.8% year-on-year in 2019, although their tonnage increased by 5.5%. That means trucks are becoming “bigger” and each vehicle is responsible for carrying more loads. There are about 30 million truck drivers in China, they are responsible for 78.22% of the total annual road freight, but the death rate is five times higher than normal, second only to miners.
In the case of Jin Deqiang, there are no specific findings on the compliance of the tariff and the quality of Beidou equipment, but according to the analysis of multiple media and experts, there are four possible reasons for the “Beidou drop-off”.
Firstly, the product manufacturer’s production quality is not up to par, which makes it easy to fail; secondly, the product operator’s network platform is not stable enough, such as downtime and data loss; then the network operator’s problem is that the communication signal transmission of the device is not stable, which can easily lead to the device not operating normally; lastly, it is man-made, such as the driver using the product improperly, which causes the wire interface to fall off, and sometimes the driver wants to package some private work. and also will simply and rudely shut down the equipment.
Finally, regardless of the final outcome of the Jin Deqiang incident if, at present, one thing is certain, for Jin Deqiang’s family, there is unlikely to be spiritual and material compensation.
Shanghai Shen Lun law firm Xia Hailong lawyer said: “According to the current public information, from the legal point of view, Jin Deqiang’s suicide and the law enforcement departments of the fine between the legal causal relationship, therefore, this can only be considered a huge social tragedy, can not be directly attributed to other parties. Even if it is finally found that Jin Deqiang’s equipment dropped because of defective product quality, it can only apply for the revocation of the $2,000 fine, and then the equipment supplier will compensate or repair according to the product contract, and there is no causal relationship between the breach of the equipment purchase contract and Jin Deqiang’s death.”
Jin Deqiang’s case has been fermented so far, involving more than sympathy for him and legal recourse, involving the interests of more groups, including drivers of large trucks, relevant law enforcement staff, Beidou equipment suppliers and other Beidou equipment industry, and even about the situation that each of us may face – encountering extreme How should we find a way out when we encounter extreme injustice? The answer will take a long time to explore and wait, but at least raising questions and issues is already a kind of progress.
Source: Huxiu