The Shanghai Municipal Transportation Commission said on its WeChat channel on Wednesday that it has fined China’s largest ride-hailing platform Didi Chuxing 100 times, adding up to a total of RMB 10 million (USD 1.4 million) since early July as it failed to remove unqualified vehicles from its platform.
The transportation authorities complained that even the heavy fines could not “wake up” Didi and that the company continues to come up with new means to dodge regulations, which have been in place since 2016, including requirements like local vehicle registration and in-car emergency call buttons to summon police. Didi has been operating in Shanghai without a license since then.
For instance, the authority said, Didi has enabled car drivers to register their cars outside Shanghai and dispatched ride-hailing orders to them while they were in Shanghai to pick up passengers.
This move is rather risky for public security as this hampers with the ability to do background checks on these drivers.
Didi told the commission that its system can only phase out cars registered outside of Shanghai within the previous month but that it could not remove those that registered earlier than this, failing to come up with any further options.
The commission warned Didi again that law enforcement could just take Didi’s app off app marketplaces entirely. It had first brought up this option at the middle of last month.