Electric Green

Travelhire group weathered the pandemic storm better than most. Now it’s restating its eco credentials with a shift to EVs

Travelhire group weathered the pandemic storm better than most. Now it’s restating its eco credentials with a shift to EVs.

We last sat down with Joe Bitran and Jonny Goldstone just 20 months ago, but it feels like a different age. The C-word had yet to enter the vocabulary; pandemics were not something we expected to experience.

Bitran’s Travelhire company had just acquired Green Tomato Cars, the eco-centric private hire fleet founded by Goldstone in 2005, but which had been taken over by French transport giant Transdev. A corporate restructure saw Transdev exit the UK private hire sector.

The pair were tackling the problems that had become evident under Transdev, and the outlook was positive. Then came Covid, and the world changed.

Like everyone in the sector, it’s been a struggle. But for the Travelhire group, it’s been less of a struggle than it has been for some.

“The furlough scheme was amazing for a business like ours,” says Bitran, “and when the full lockdown was announced it meant no one could travel on public transport. Because we held most of the contracts with the NHS trusts in London, we got hit with an avalanche of work because all the doctors and nurses were told to call us to get a taxi in to work.”

“On top of that, the roads were empty, so cars could move about freely. And that basically saved us. I’m sure that if we’d been corporate only, we’d have shut down, because our corporate work declined by 97%.”

The group was operating at around 50% of pre-pandemic turnover, putting it in a much better position than many competitors. Bitran adds: “We also did a lot of work for the train operating companies, and the trains kept running on a reduced level.”

Now, with lockdown over, Goldstone says the expected September work resumption has happened. “We’re busier than I can remember us being,” he says. “But there’s a chronic driver shortage and it’s not going to go away.”

Further cost-cutting saw the company move out of the rented offices on Western Avenue and back into the old Green Tomato Cars depot offices in

nearby Isleworth. “We’d talked about moving into one office for some time,” says Bitran. “With our own fleet team under one roof it’s much more joined up.”

Indeed, the group is emerging from the pandemic in a stronger position, with a bigger fleet than before, and additional business through the acquisition earlier in 2021 of Brunel.

For Bitran, this deal had echoes of the Green Tomato Cars takeover. A well-established London private hire operator with a strong brand, which had also been taken over by a French group with ambitions for the UK private hire world, but no idea how to turn them into reality. “We’d looked at buying Brunel before,” says Bitran, and we got a call last Christmas asking if we’d be interested in buying it.”

Brunel had been taken over by car rental giant Europcar, which had wanted to add a chauffeured service to its offering and saw Brunel as a way to achieve this. But with the pandemic hitting the car rental business extremely hard, Brunel was an easy cut to make.

“It had been losing fortunes,” says Goldstone. “They didn’t have anyone to run it and Europcar had to go to the French Government for a bail-out. One of the conditions of that was they had to get rid of all non-core assets.” After a competitive tender process, Travelhire group was chosen and the deal was completed at the end of March 2021.

The Brunel office in the East End has been closed and the business has been integrated into the group, and is now run out of the same office as Green Tomato Cars. Operations director Beth Sampson has stayed with the business, and a handful of sales and logistic people – but the vast majority of the staff took redundancy rather than relocate to the other side of London.

The car fleet was easier to sort – all the cars were owned by Europcar, and the cars simply went back to the parent company. “A decent number of the drivers stayed, as they’re obviously less sensitive to the head office change,” says Goldstone.

The approach so far is to take the Brunel model and make it more sustainable. Clients are demanding green vehicles including zero-emissions cars, so that’s what is being offered. “We reassured them and it’s gone as well as we could have expected,” says Bitran. Brunel’s Catalina system has been ditched and the fleet is now on the Green Tomato Cars bespoke system.”

The three brands sit in different niches, says Goldstone. Travelhire is luxury chauffeuring; Green Tomato Cars is “sustainability and volume”, and Brunel fills a space in the middle, focused on corporate work. It means pitches for work can be done using all three brands.

Not that there’s much pitching going on. “At the moment, it’s clients chasing operators,” says Bitran. “At the moment, there are only two operators who can really fulfil – us and Addison Lee.”

The other change at the moment is the relationship between operators and drivers. This has been a dramatic switch, says Goldstone. “During lockdown, drivers were desperate for any work they could get. Now, they can choose which operators to work for.”

This is reflected in the group’s approach to drivers. Rather than going down the “worker” route, Travelhire Group has started hiring drivers full-time as PAYE employees. And those drivers will be driving electric vehicles, as Green Tomato Cars seeks to restate its eco credentials.

As a pioneer of clean transport in London, Green Tomato cars built up a fleet of more than 300 Toyota Prius hybrids. But with TfL’s rules now preventing the standard, non-PHEV Prius from being registered, the fleet has been disposed of – amazingly, there are no Priuses left on the fleet. In their place came a large number of BMW 225xe plug-in hybrid MPVs, but even these are now on borrowed time. From this month, PHEVs lose their congestion charge exemption, so the only way is pure electric.

Thus, Green Tomato Cars has ordered 100 Volkswagen ID.3 cars as the new mainstay of its fleet. “We’ve bought them outright,” says Bitran. The first cars have been delivered and are already in service – with employee drivers at the wheel.

Ultimately the plan is to convert the entire fleet to zero emissions, though it’s not easy to find suitable vehicles. The company’s executive fleet is mainly BMW 530e PHEVs, but there isn’t an obvious EV replacement at the moment. Nevertheless, Bitran says: “We’ll be fully zero emissions by Q2 next year in all categories except MPV. All our standard cars will be zero-emissions by the end of the year.” The fleet of 70 Toyota Mirai hydrogen-electric cars is part of that mix, and will remain.

But that means the BMW 225xes will be gone, having spent less than a year on the fleet. “They’re going to start costing us £15 a day from October 25 because of the C-charge,” says Bitran But as they were purchased rather than leased, this is not a problem, “We’re a healthy business,” he says. “So we don’t have to get stuck into leases. We can buy cars and that gives us flexibility.

The VW ID.3 is the right solution at the moment – though with increasing numbers of EVs being launched that might change. Goldstone believes the ID.3 is a better option than the larger ID.4, which has been selected by rival Addison Lee as its zeroemission car. “You can’t get more passengers in – there’s a tiny bit more leg space and luggage room, but it’s massively more expensive, and we think the carbon footprint of building it is bigger.”

The problem with the MPV fleet is a source of annoyance to Bitran. The group still uses diesel vehicles, because it can’t find an adequate replacement. Mercedes-Benz EQV is too expensive; Vauxhall Vivaro e-Life doesn’t have the range. The Ford Tourneo Connect PHEV isn’t C-Charge exempt.

Bitran and has written to TfL asking for common sense to prevail. “We’ve got a crazy situation where they are making us run old diesel cars. The idiot that wrote back to me hadn’t realised that the point I was making was about MPVs, not cars. They’re idiots, and they just don’t care. It took a month to reply and they just sent a boilerplate letter.”

“Rather than running diesels that can be up to 10 years old, let us replace those with cleaner petrol- or diesel-powered cars and we’ll run them for seven years, not 10.”

Replacing the executive fleet is challenging. Travehire’s requirement is for 100 cars, but right now there’s not a lot in the executive EV space. Tesla has been rejected on the grounds of poor service. “We talked to them about buying 100 cars, they said we could do it online. It’s like dealing with children.”

The Jaguar i-Pace is an option, and indeed, Travelhire has won the contract to run the VIP transport for the COP26 environmental summit in Glasgow. Jaguar is providing 220 cars; Travelhire is sourcing the drivers and running the fleet. But Bitran has reservations about some of the car’s features and technology.

Bitran says the choice is more likely to be BMW. “We’re looking at the iX3. We have a grown-up relationship with BMW and can talk to them in an adult way.” Proper luxury BMW EVs in the 5-series and 7-series class are on the way, but not for 12-18 months, and the same goes for the Mercedes EQE. As with the volume fleet, Bitran is prepared to be flexible, and the fleet may change as more suitable cars appear.