Will Tesla’s Cybercabs replace PHV?
As a professional driver, you will have most likely heard or seen something about the Tesla Cybercab that was announced last week (October 10, 2024). Now, the team at tflseru.co.uk don’t care so much about Elon Musk’s shenanigans, however we do consider our fellow Private Hire Drivers in London. So, with that in mind we decided to see if this new autonomous minicab or taxi will take over the PHV industry and take all your jobs.
The first thing to consider is London and the way our roads are laid out as well as the size of the roads. Unlike California, the road system in London is not your typical grid system you see across the USA. London is made up of a mixture of old and new roads, leading to many narrow side roads and complex one-way systems. Adding to that, the roads in London are forever being changed. It would take years and constant mapping of the roads in London to get an autonomous vehicle to easily navigate.
The number of Private Hire Vehicles in London currently is 92,894. There are also 107,515 Private Hire Drivers. Both these numbers have been growing. Assuming a company like Uber that has around 45,000 PHV drivers, decides to get rid of drivers and replaces them with autonomous vehicles. At the price of around £23,000 each, it would cost them over 1 billion pounds just to purchase the vehicles and then there’s the additional cost of storage and maintenance.
If we consider the UK as a whole, there are 318,008 Private Hire Vehicles and most are within smaller towns, that have very similar roads to London. The whole idea of an autonomous taxi in these towns seems impractical.
Taking a closer look at the Tesla Cybercab, it doesn’t look practical as a vehicle to use for Private Hire. It looks more like a futuristic sports car. It being driverless also means that there is no extra assistance, for example if someone needed help getting in and out the vehicle. Which brings us to the human element of being a Private Hire Driver or a chauffeur even. A driverless car would mean no help getting things like luggage’s in and out the vehicle. The whole service element of the experience would be gone, and we think the majority of passengers won’t like that.
Overall, we think that it’ll be a good few years before driverless vehicles hit the streets of London and UK. And even when they do, they’ll just become a third layer of licensed passenger carrying vehicles after Black Taxi’s and Private Hire Vehicles. It could even be a bigger risk to Black Taxi’s than PHV’s, as their numbers have been on the decline for a long time now.
