UK Independent dealers in London Taxi International, Black Cabs to the rest of us, have been literally sacked by LTI. The Coventry based Taxi manufacturer has given 12 month termination notices to all its dealers planning to sell their taxis themselves in order to save on costs.
Back in 2003 taxi-maker LTI was in its strongest position for years, according to its managing director at the time, Peter Shilcock.
The Headline read: “Cab-maker hails ‘exciting future’ Boss tells of strong base for growth” There was a strong base. The Disability Discrimination Act was flavour of the month ‘Deregulation of Taxis’ was the Buzzword. Things were looking very rosy for the makers of purpose built Taxis.
Skip Forwards a few years……..
There is no denying LTI sales have fallen in recent years. Here on the shop floor, Taxi drivers saw this coming. Our once lucrative trade was actually hijacked some years ago by the sellers of larger cabs; they pounced on the Disability Discrimination Act and peddled their vehicles to any Council that would listen. Over the next ten years or so Taxi fleets doubled and Taxi drivers earnings dropped. Deregulation was a bonus for them but, ironically, probably played a large part in the drop off in sales. Once all these budding Taxi drivers spent all their money on expensive cabs they then quickly came to the realisation that they were working merely to make the payments. Now we are in a recession and not many Taxi drivers are renewing these large expensive cabs.
They didn’t do their sums a few years back did they? If you saturate a market in order to make big sales of large wheelchair accessible vehicles, you have to know, somewhere deep in your educated mind that repeat sales will drop off as Taxi driver earnings decline, due in turn to larger numbers of Taxis. It’s quite obvious really!
It is hard to have any sympathy. They decimated the taxi trade in the name of their own profits.
Private Hire constantly tell Hacks “you are too expensive” the reason we are more expensive is our vehicles are more expensive due to these profiteering car manufacturers. What’s the betting within a year they begin to make inroads to the Private Hire market, pushing Councils and MP’s to make Private Hire go wheelchair accessible and when they succeed and totally destroy every corner of the Taxi trade they may finally begin to sell their vehicles a little cheaper but by then they will have a very large customer base and Taxi drivers will still be working just to make the payments.
VAUXHALL car dealer Peter Vardy has revealed a sales increase of 35 per cent over the past year…… This will be due to Ex Hacks migrating to Private Hire!
