EZZY ran BMW i3s at a loss per ride until the cash — and the deposits — ran out

EZZY was a Beijing car-sharing startup founded in 2015 by Fu Qiang, running a premium fleet of BMW i3s, Audi A3s and Mercedes sedans that users unlocked through an app after paying a 2,000-yuan deposit. It raised a 40-million-yuan angel round in August 2015 and a Series A in May 2017, betting that affluent Chinese drivers would pay for a seamless, premium car-sharing experience.

The economics never worked. Chinese tech media later reported that the company lost money on every ride — '每做一单都要赔钱' — because fleet costs, charging, parking, insurance and more than 30 dispatch drivers exceeded what users paid. A 20-million-yuan round in February 2017 was nowhere near enough to close the gap.

On October 23, 2017 the company announced it was dissolving; two days later it published a notice to users promising refunds. Roughly 1,700 to 1,800 users had 2,000-yuan deposits in the system — about 3.6 million yuan in total — and users rushed to get their money back as the company wound down.

EZZY was an early casualty of the Chinese car-sharing wave that followed ride-hailing's boom. Capital-intensive fleets, brutal pricing competition and unit economics that never turned positive killed most of the startups in the category, and EZZY's collapse in October 2017 became a case study in why premium positioning alone cannot fix a business model that loses money on every transaction.