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Being a melting pot of races, cultures, and languages, services in Malaysia have put many policies in place to accommodate the country’s diverse population.
E-hailing company Grab has a feature on their GrabCar service where customers can opt for a driver who is fluent in the Mandarin language. However, this option comes at a slightly higher price, as any additional feature or service usually does.
This feature did not sit well with the president of the Association of Land Public Transport Transformation Association (TPAD) Nathan Mathivanan, who accused Grab of being discriminatory against other races in a TikTok video recently.
In the video, Nathan claimed he tested it by booking cars with the Mandarin-fluent driver option twice, on separate devices, and kept getting assigned Chinese drivers.
“At the bottom, there’s an option to book a car with a Mandarin-fluent driver. The price is higher and it’s Chinese drivers who get the job. That was just from me. I tested it on another phone and the same thing happened. This is totally called discrimination,” he said.
“This is Malaysia. If you don’t know Bahasa, what you have to do is change the app language to English. If you don’t know English, I believe you have a language plug-in to automatically translate,” he added.
A quick check by TRP found that the Grab app did indeed show a higher fee for booking a standard GrabCar (four seater) with a Mandarin fluent driver.
The option for a Mandaring-speaking driver is just a feature, customers can still choose to book a standard GrabCar
As with any value-added service, an extra charge is usually imposed. In this case, someone who might not be fluent in Malay or English might have trouble communicating with their driver, and that is where the Mandarin-fluent driver option comes in.
Several social media users commented on the video, highlighting that a Mandarin-fluent driver is an option so customers still may choose whether they want to pay more for better communication with their driver.
“This is optional so you can choose. Don’t politicise this. It’s an advantage if the driver is a Mandarin speaker and gets paid a little more,” one user commented.
Another individual pointed out that people who speak Mandarin do not necessarily have to be Chinese, which is a fair point as anybody can learn a language.
Interestingly, a user who claims to be a Grab driver-partner said that he is Chinese but also a “banana” who doesn’t know how to speak the Chinese language, and therefore was not placed as a “Mandarin-fluent driver” in the app.
Meanwhile, some users say the option is possibly targeted towards Chinese tourists who most likely do not know how to converse in Malay or English at all.
In any case, the option does not affect us as Malaysians as most of us would probably pick the cheaper option anyway since Malay and English are the primary languages here.
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