I appreciate it as well. Always a pleasure. Thank you for pushing technology, pushing progression in Taiwan, which obviously you’re a champion of the future.

Thank you so much for your time.

If there’s a big difference between the two in terms of timeline, and a decision is giving on 103-1 in two weeks, then drivers might not be able to switch to the final e-taxi version...

Because that timeline would then, then lead to overlap with the current timeline.

Those are two key aspects.

We are going to solve is one largely, Minister is that 10,000 partners and 200, 300 rental car partners, the drivers don’t lose their livelihood overnight. And rental car partners don’t lose the investment that they’ve made over the past two years. They have legitimate and regulated business.

Those are the two conditions.

Almost.

Across the world, those are the two conditions that determine how successful this model has been for the other partner. Those are the two asks, which are still not completely clear as we just talked about.

It could be a transition period, Minister. Again, unless the dynamic pricing and the supply caps are clear, my sense is it’ll be more of a pilot than a transition to complete the policy. You don’t know how some of these will work if it’s not pure dynamic pricing and ...

Two is a certain period of time that gives this transition and us to be able to prove that it works versus a sudden flip of a switch where you say, "All rental cars and all rental car partners now convert to this one." That’s our preference.

There are two things that are preferable. One is scale that you can show results.

For sure.

Evidence either way.

Correct.

Test every assumption that we’ve made on taxi driver earnings. That help to calibrate what the final regulation comes to. So that we’re not doing something which causes some change in a way that we not thought through or that is very negative to the rest.

In Hong Kong, for example, one of the things, as Willy said, was we’ve got people who are doing point to point. Then we started on boarding taxi as well. This is a pilot that we would run for the next six to nine months.

Yes.

Absolutely.

It should be optional, in my mind. It should not be mandatory for somebody to have a meter, or a printer, or a radio dispatch device. If you are using an app, you don’t need all of those things.

Yes. Actually, I’d be happy to give you case examples from multiple countries that have done so.

Off peak hours is one key area. Then you do a microcosm, supply and demand balance. Any time demand is less supply is more, have the flexibility to offer the lower pricing as well.

My concern with this one is we will move the drivers over to an e-taxi license but their earnings will actually be hurt. They will earn less than what they are earning right now because we will not be able to increase efficiency by that much over that taxi driver ...

Correct. The challenge with that is you cannot increase efficiency by that much if you don’t offer a pricing flexibility on both ends. Pricing flexibility is required, for example, on off peak hours, when demand is low to offer a lower price so that demand is higher even in those ...

The way we can do that while still offering competitive prices to riders is increasing the efficiency of how much a car is utilized. That’s a fundamental business model. If your car was utilized 15 percent, if you can utilize it 50 percent, you can make the driver more earnings ...

That’s the key reason why many driver partners have come to the platform. It’s beneficial for the drivers.

For the significant majority of them — if not of all of them — their earning on a platform is higher than what they earned when they were driving a taxi. It ranges from 15 percent higher to 30 , 35 percent higher.

I think the challenge, Minister — if I can jump in – is Uber globally must have maybe about four million drivers active on the platform. A lot of them are former taxi drivers, all the taxi drivers in the various countries that they are in.

How quickly, Minister, do you think the process will be from converting former rental car licenses to an e-taxi license?

Any particular perspective emerging from that based on the input?

They have?

I’m not sure the MoTC has seen that or taken that into consideration.

One of the other things that, Minister, you’ve been a champion of is transparency and collaboration. With your website, join.gov.tw, with the 103-1 proposal, there were over 7,000 comments that were on the website with some proposals, changes. Many of them actually had concern at what would happen to rental ...

Is there a way to do this while still remaining with the existing rental car partners? Many of them have invested a lot of money to buy the cars as well.

Can this license be transferred with the current rental car companies, or will the driver have to partner with the new taxi fleet company or somebody else who might have a taxi license existing?

One question for my understanding.

From your perspective, Minister, where should there be a meter in the taxi? Is there a scenario where you see the meter going away?

One is there is no dynamic pricing. Two is there are supply caps on them, number of licenses that we can get. Both of those will make it very challenging to switch and come under this...

Let’s call it e-taxi.

95 percent is less than an hour, which means they will not be able to do the current way that they are structured. That will be a big loss. The challenge, at least as far as our understanding, is this multi purpose kind of permit is...

One of the challenges that the rental car partners that we’ve talked to are seeing is one of the proposals is limiting it to a one hour rental for any trip. Most of the trips that the rental car drivers took today took less than an hour.

OK, that’s the...

From your understanding, there’s a taxi license, there’s a rental car license, but the diversified license is not?

Correct.

The rental separation. The consultation period is going on currently with a date of two weeks from now. I just wanted your perspective. I’ll lay out some of the thinking and what we are seeing, but would love your own perspective.

I would love to one of these days. Good progress, plus for these dimensions. One of the reasons today, Minister, I wanted to get your advice was on something that you are probably familiar with that’s impacting how we operate today, and all the rental car partners and drivers with ...

That’s on track. Good progress. Also, autonomous, very good. It is another big vision that we have.

We are making good progress on the Elevate. We’re still on target for final testing in the next year and a half to two years and commercial run maybe a year after that.

Yeah.

It was at the Elevate Summit mid last year.