Taxis in the UK have increased their carbon emissions by over 25% in the last 10 years alone. However, in spite of the rise of ride hailing apps, the £9bn UK cab market is still mostly served by over 10,000 Private Hire (minicab) taxi firms, representing c100,000 cab drivers. Most of these cab firms are small/medium sized businesses with little or no technology, often run by staff of BAME background -- indeed, DfT reports that 40% of cab drivers in England/Wales are BAME (94% in London).

The Covid-19 lockdown has significantly impacted all the livelihoods of the cab industry, with bookings slowly returning yet subdued by a lack of corporate and airport transfer work. However, a green recovery via a shift towards decarbonised transport risks leaving the cab sector behind as its operators are woefully unprepared to adopt Zero Emission Electric Vehicle (EV) cabs. With their revenues impacted, the lack of data available for a 3 car fleet in a town or a 100 car fleet in a city to understand how to generate a Return on Investment from how they would use EVs (from an executive Tesla to a Nissan Leaf) is constraining their adoption, whilst range anxiety about EV battery ranges are limiting EVs to only local cab fares (rather than more lucrative airport or out of town trips), weakening their utilisation and hence their ROI case, a vicious cycle.

At the same time, consumers/businesses will only book EVs on scale if the pricing & availability of these cabs is normalised vs. regular cabs, a dynamic fleets don't have the tools to manage; and the fragmented nature of thousands of cab fleets means there is scarce data on tracking a transition to EV cabs for environmental/transport studies.

[minicabit.com][0] is Britain's largest cab aggregator with its tech platform and algorithms enabling consumers/businesses to compare and book 800+ cab firms (with over 20,000 drivers) in over 550 UK towns & cities. minicabit is uniquely placed via this project to

* help cash constrained, typically low tech cab firms & drivers, alongside the largest cab firms, diligently get a return from investing in EVs
* drive usage of EV cabs by consumers/businesses
* output unique data insights on EV cab usage for government, the transport sector and R&D bodies.

[0]: http://minicabit.com/