IGNORE TESLA AT YOUR PERIL
TESLA, THE THREAT NO ONE IN PRIVATE HIRE IS TALKING ABOUT
Article by Rob Finlayson Operations Manager City Cars Glasgow
rob@citycarsglasgow.co.uk
In a previous article I intimated that 2026 might be the year that Uber’s dominance of the taxi and private hire market starts to crack. Rising costs, unpredictable commission structures, weakening and fractious driver relations and declining customer service standards all conspiring to begin the downfall of the app giant.
Whilst the industry spends its energy arguing over Uber and either agreeing or disagreeing with my musings, the real long-term threat may be lurking somewhere else entirely.
That threat isn’t another booking platform - it’s the car itself. More accurately, companies such as Tesla.
Uber is fundamentally a software company. It doesn’t own a fleet of vehicles, it doesn’t manufacture hardware and it doesn’t control the machines that actually move passengers. It simply sits in the middle matching supply with demand and taking its slice of the fare between passengers and drivers.
Tesla operates in an entirely different space. It controls the hardware, the software and increasingly the technological foundations for a transport network that could bypass traditional operators and drivers altogether. The scale of the potential fleet is already in place we just don’t see it that way yet.
There are already more than 250,000 Teslas on UK roads. Every one of these is a connected vehicle, constantly receiving software updates, collecting driving data and capable of integrating into a wider digital ecosystem. Some older vehicles may need hardware upgrades before they
could operate
autonomously, but the underlying platform is already there and waiting.
Once autonomous driving technology becomes viable and legally approved at scale, the implications for our industry are enormous. A network of self-driving
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vehicles wouldn’t need drivers. It wouldn’t need dispatch desks, controllers or fleet managers.
And crucially, it wouldn’t need billions of pounds to deploy fleets across the country.
The fleet already exists.
Look around the next time you are on shift and count how many Teslas you see on the road. Then compare that number to the number of licensed taxis and private hire vehicles you encounter. You’re not quite outnumbered…. Yet.
Hundreds of thousands of Tesla owners already possess vehicles that could, in theory, become part of a massive autonomous fleet almost overnight. That’s a fleet that would absolutely dwarf any other operator on the Taxi Summit Power List. Last I checked, Veezu the UK’s largest single operator in the UK, was sitting just shy of 20,000 drivers… Tesla has more than ten times that number of cars in the UK, with many more owners sitting in the wings should the winds of change blow in.
I would wager that a good number of the current, and an even bigger number of future owners, would be perfectly happy to monetise their cars if the option existed to allow them to operate autonomously whilst the owner is at work, at home or asleep. After all, who wouldn’t want an asset that earns money while it sits on the driveway? Instead of your car depreciating in the company car park whilst you slave away at your 9- 5, it’s out on the road giving you a side hustle income.
On a purely economic basis the concept is powerful. A car that currently sits idle for twenty-plus hours a day suddenly becomes a revenue-generating asset. Owners take a share of the income while a platform manages routing, charging and passenger matching.
With no driver wages involved, the economics change dramatically.
The obvious question then becomes: how does the taxi and private hire trade compete with a global company capable of running transport networks at a fraction of the cost?
For now, this remains largely theoretical. Autonomous driving regulations in the UK still have significant
APRIL 2026 PHTM
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