Official Statement - 3rd July 2019
Dear Tribecar Community and Members of the Public,
Around three years ago, Tribecar made the Home section of The Straits Times for launching a $2 car rental service in Singapore. That is how we grew from just 10 cars to 350 cars (and now, luxury cars, vans, lorries and even motorcycles) in our fleet. I am happy to say that we have done so with no external funding as well.
Imagine my surprise when we were featured today on The Straits Times this last weekend with the headline: “Tribecar Skids As Rental Market Heats Up”.
We would just like to reinforce that Tribecar is, in fact, doing well; our business is sustainable, and our results show that we are growing.
In 2018, Tribecar posted a record 50% growth in sales to $7.5 million in 2018, we have seen membership rise to over almost 50%, and have a fleet of 350 cars — of which 20% are brand new cars purchased in the last 6 months.
When Paul and I started Tribecar, we wanted to make transport more accessible to and affordable for everyone in Singapore, striving always to put user demands first. This is why, earlier this year, we introduced a car rental service to cater to new drivers, and why now, we will be launching a car rental service that caters specifically to BTO estates. We would like to say that the story written in The Straits Times does not fully represent the situation at Tribecar, nor showcase both sides of the story, which is why we’d like to officially address these points below:
Transfer of Mazda 3 to Car Lite
This was the most surprising of all concerns. We genuinely thought it was common knowledge that most car-sharing platforms rent cars that could be owned by other car rental companies. In Tribecar’s case, to meet user demands, we brought on board 5 cars from CL Leasing. When our lease contract expired, we simply returned the cars back to CL Leasing. These vehicles were subsequently transferred to their own car-sharing platform. It was not due to the fact that Tribecar could not pay for repairs, as was reported, which is categorically untrue. In fact, we eagerly share our car-sharing technology with other car rental businesses, because it is our belief that it is only through cooperation with other businesses that can we make a big enough difference in Singaporeans’ lives. We share our tech freely, knowing full well that we could lose customers to other companies.
Expiration of Road Tax
Part of what Mr. Tan mentioned was true: we did miss out on one renewal because of human error, where one of our staff incorrectly input that renewal would only be needed in August, instead of February - a single case. However, what was written about cars not having insurance coverage is incorrect, since unlike private cars, fleet cars have fleet insurance. This means that regardless of road tax status, there will be insurance coverage precisely because of fleet wide insurance. This issue has also been resolved with the fleet owner.
Other than the one case mentioned above, the rest of the Tribecar fleet is on GIRO renewal. This means that renewal status might not always be 100% updated in the system — which can be attributed to the fact that after GIRO deducts the payment on the day itself, it takes a few days to be reflected on LTA’s side. This is merely the way the system works, and it is essential to point out that Tribecar has not been penalised by LTA for any of these perceived ‘lapses’, since these weren’t lapses at all — information just takes a while to be updated. That said, if any of our Tribecar members are unsure, they may drop us an email at [email protected], and we’d be happy to double check.
Alleged ‘corner-cutting’ in Maintenance
Our priority at Tribecar has always been safety and mechanical soundness. We use a mix of Original and OEM parts, but we have never used ‘spare parts from scrap taxis’ or any other parts that are not up to standard. Our fleet of cars are regularly inspected by LTA (almost on an annual basis), and we can assure users that only cars passed by LTA have been allowed to be rented.
Customer Service is Slow
On this point, I would like to apologise to our community if they have not enjoyed quick enough service. An unanticipated surge in uptake of our car-sharing service resulted in delays around customer service. While we are not there yet, I can assure you that we are trying our best to deal with backlogs we have. We’d also like to thank the Tribecar community for being patient as we try to bridge these gaps.
Buying New Cars is Bad?
I’ll end off with the most heart wrenching point for the team: that Tribecar’s fleet size shrank due to the company’s inability to sustain a larger fleet size. This is untrue, as Tribecar has simply made the conscious decision get our fleet partners to trade in their older cars for new ones! As about 3 older trade-in cars are typically needed to put down the deposit for 1 new car, it is no wonder our fleet is slightly smaller. Additionally, with the low COE at that point of time, we decided that trading in some of these older cars would mean that we can provide our users with brand new car models at a similar price point.
I’d just like to reiterate that from the very start, our goal at Tribecar was to make cars cheaper and more accessible to all Singaporeans. Before establishing the company, Paul and I decided to build our business the old fashioned way: making money by renting out cars, and then reinvesting our profits. We believe that the best way to run a company is to be earnest, earn our profits dollar by dollar, and only spend what we have in our piggy bank.
As a start-up, profits are a really nice bonus, but not a must. We knew this going into the start-up landscape, and we have been extremely lucky that we have managed to stay profitable — even though our profits aren’t the largest, it provides our team and community with reassurance. Since we run our company with no external funding, the whole Tribecar team is very proud of the fact that we always in the green.
Tribecar is also committed to serving our customers as best as we can, and meeting customer needs is the only metric that matters to us. This is why we’ve spent almost 3 million Singapore dollars on R&D, which went into designing our own Tribecar hardware and software to aid in streamlining our processes. As a solid result, starting rental rates have stayed at $2 an hour for the past 3 years.
We are genuinely saddened by the way the story was written, as it seem to diminish our efforts at putting customers first, and that our modest profits are something we shouldn’t be proud of. We sincerely wish that Mr. Tan would have contacted us to further clarification before publishing this story.
On behalf of Paul and the Tribecar team, we’d like to take this opportunity to express our gratitude to the Tribecar community for their heartening emails and comments of encouragement — these inspire us to push ourselves more every day, and reminds us why we do what we do!