PREDICTIONS FOR 2023 Article supplied by:
Amer Hasan, CEO of minicabit, Britain’s largest cab aggregator
minicabit.com
‘workhorse’ models typically used in the cab trade, for instance in the 7-9 seater segment.
I hope your New Year was happier than last year’s when we were at the tail end of the pandemic. 2023 is the Year of the Rabbit in the Chinese Zodiac, a calm yet hopeful creature. After the year we’ve just had, some calm and hope would be welcome in our cab industry! With the macro economic picture often feeling beyond our control, it’s hard to make predictions for the year ahead when even the next months are foggy. But at minicabit, Britain’s largest cab aggregator, we always need to plan ahead for the long term so I will give it a shot.
STRIKES: we're going through a winter of considerable discontent, with strike action across various public sector workforces as they cope with the cost of living crisis. Indeed, to help address this hardship for NHS staff, minicabit has been running its Fares that Care campaign where it will donate to NHS Charities Together £1 for every cab trip (from its own revenues) that’s booked and completed by the end of this month. We may see ongoing strikes in the rail sector and elsewhere for some time. This can often boost demand for cabs at a time when inflation, a spike in fuel prices due to the war in Ukraine and a cab industry shortage of drivers, have driven up cab fares. In fact, the average cab fare booked on minicabit is now over £80, almost double pre-pandemic!
INFLATION: the outlook over the year is that inflation should come back
down to earth with the
government’s focus on energy independence potentially lowering the pressure on price rises. Yet the recession biting might prompt more workers to join the cab trade, some returning from delivery work. As an industry that has long had more demand than it can handle (as is certainly the case with minicabit), improving its supply is no bad thing.
ELECTRIC VEHICLES (EVs): should start to really penetrate our industry as global supply issues post- pandemic start to resolve. Likely the biggest change is that, where most EV models in recent years were launching in family hatchback or luxury model segments, now we’ll start to see more EV-based
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CHARGING POINT INFRASTRUCTURE: will still not be available enough, especially outside the larger urban areas, but at least we’ll start to see faster charging points that are more suited for EV cab drivers with less downtime, and more universal payment systems. Importantly, we’ll see more cities and transport hubs such as airports, consider decarbonising policies that lean into EVs. minicabit itself will favour EVs more, having overhauled its cab supplier portal to offer a free suite of tools that enable cab operators of all sizes and locations to easily transition to EVs and maximise their usage.
VAT: a less exciting topic will be around how VAT is treated on cab fares. No doubt there’ll be much discussion, noise, fear and frustration as local entities interpret a national tax in different ways. But in any case, the need will grow for even the smallest cab firms to take on a dispatch system to allow a better audit trail of their cab fares.
LARGER AGGREGATORS: we could also see fewer large cab aggregators remain in our industry, where scale of demand and supply will start to matter. Dispatch software systems will follow suit, integrating more than ever before with such demand platforms to channel more work to their cab fleet clients. minicabit, as Britain’s largest, most visited, cab aggregator covering 550 towns and cities UK wide will be amongst them, already integrating with eight of the largest dispatch systems. With over £10 million of cab fares still going unfulfilled, we’re always on the lookout for fleets of even the smallest size to join the other 800+ operators on our network.
CHATGPT: finally, how do you feel about ChatGPT? That might sounds like gobbledygook now but apparently it’s being hyped as the biggest wave of technology, perhaps since the launch of the web browser. This is essentially a chatbot powered by Artificial Intelligence so mature that it can take on creative tasks, for instance creating a joke or a poem based on the flimsiest of topics you give it. Some say it might be a Google killer as it can craft intelligent answers from instantly analysing billions of data points and trends, others say it could even replace a lawyer…so there are benefits! But whether it will ever replace the service and a smile of a cab driver remains to be seen.
Here’s to a great 2023! JANUARY 2023 PHTM
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