Who Really Owns the Taxi Apps?

For licensed London Hackney drivers. UK-only. A companion to the Waymo post.

There's a connection running through the taxi trade that almost nobody talks about — and once you've seen it, you can't unsee it.

The companies that own, built, or bankrolled the big ride-hailing apps are, in many cases, the same companies building the driverless cars.

That isn't a conspiracy theory. It's a matter of public record. And it quietly changes the maths for every driver who depends on an app for work.

The car industry bought into the apps years ago

Wind back to around 2016 and you'll find the world's biggest car manufacturers buying their way into ride-hailing:

Two of Germany's biggest car makers built and owned one of Europe's largest taxi apps for years — before recently selling it on to a US ride-hailing company.
Toyota invested in the biggest US ride-hailing app, then later put a billion dollars into a major Asian one.
Volkswagen put hundreds of millions into a European ride-hailing firm.
General Motors backed a major US app — and spent years and around $10 billion building its own driverless-taxi unit.

The trade press at the time called it carmakers "racing into ride-sharing." The car industry could see where mobility was heading and bought itself a seat at the table. Sensible business.

But ask the obvious next question: when those same car makers start selling licensed driverless cars, which cars do you think the apps they own and back will be putting on the road?

The one that should stop every London cabbie in their tracks

Here's where it gets personal for the London trade.

The iconic London black cab — the TX, the TXe you might be sitting in right now — is made by LEVC, the London Electric Vehicle Company. LEVC is owned by Geely, the Chinese automotive giant. The same Geely owns Volvo and Polestar, holds part of Lotus, and owns close to 10% of Mercedes-Benz — one of the car makers behind that big European app.

And Geely is deep into driverless:

Geely's Zeekr brand builds Waymo's latest robotaxi. Waymo's sixth-generation driverless car is built on Geely's platform. In other words, the driverless taxis being prepared for London's streets are, in large part, built by the same company that makes your cab.
Geely's own ride-hailing arm in China is already running a robotaxi fleet and has unveiled a purpose-built driverless taxi — the EVA Cab — heading toward mass production.

Sit with that for a moment. The company that makes the most iconic taxi in the world is also building the driverless cars designed to do the work of taxi drivers. That's not an accusation — it's their business, and it's a smart one. But it tells you exactly which way the wind is blowing.

The double whammy — why this is worse than it first looks

Here's the part that should concern any driver who works through an app and doesn't own their own customers.

When a ride-hailing app owns the customer relationship, the customer belongs to the app, not to you. You already know this — it's why, the day you stop using an app, the work stops. The passenger never had your number. They only ever had the platform's.

Now add the driverless piece. A platform that (a) owns the customer and (b) is owned by, or aligned with, a car maker has a powerful incentive: once its own driverless cars are licensed, it earns more by sending the job to a car it doesn't have to pay a driver for. No wages, no breaks, no holiday — just the vehicle the parent company profits from most.

No app will announce this. Nobody's sending an email that says "we're prioritising robots over you." But the economics only point one way. Wherever a driverless car can do the job, the platform has every reason to route the work to it — and the human driver who spent years building that platform's customer base gets quietly bypassed.

That's the double whammy: you don't own the customer, and then the customer gets handed to the machine you helped make viable. Every fare you ran through the app helped prove the model, grow the customer base, and fund the very technology now lining up to compete with you. It's the hardest version of digging your own grave — doing it a fare at a time, without ever meaning to.

The flip side — drivers hold more power than they think

Now the hopeful part, because this isn't a doom story. It's a wake-up call with a way out.

The apps have one dependency they can't engineer away yet: drivers. Until driverless fleets are everywhere — and that is years and many billions away (General Motors alone spent around $10bn and still pulled its robotaxi unit) — the apps need human drivers to function. Take the drivers away and the app has nothing to sell.

So here's the thought experiment BAT.TAXI's founder, Peter Schive — a working London cabbie himself — keeps coming back to:

If every driver in the world owned their own passengers, no driver would need a taxi app. They'd be too busy doing their own work — and each other's. And an app with no drivers is an app with nothing to route.

That's the whole idea behind BAT.TAXI. Not to fight the apps. Not to build another app that owns you. But to put the customer relationship back where it belongs — with the driver — so that whatever the car makers and the apps do next, your customers are yours. They've got your number. They book you direct. And when you can't take a job, you pass it to a trusted Co Driver on your terms — driver helping driver, instead of both of you feeding a platform that's planning to replace you.

This is why you build your Ark now

The Waymo post lays out the "build your Ark" case — own a direct customer book before the driverless cars arrive, and you're insulated. This is the same message from a different angle: the apps were never going to be your lifeboat, because the people who own them are building the flood.

The drivers who come through the next few years intact will be the ones who own their customers — passengers who would specifically rather have them than a stranger or an algorithm. That's the one asset no car maker, no app, and no robotaxi can take off you.

What to do about it (it isn't complicated)

Treat every fare as a chance to add one passenger to your own customer book — not the app's. Join the London Taxi pre-launch waiting list — Platform Only is £4.99 a month, cancel anytime; the London Driver Pack is £99 first year (platform included), then £39.99/year.
Invite your regulars to book you direct. Every customer you sign up gets their own app to book you, linked only to you — no other driver is ever connected to your customers.
Build it now, while you've still got the easy fares to fund the effort — not after the driverless cars start taking them.

This isn't about fear. It's about getting ahead of something that's already in motion. The car makers have made their move. The apps have made theirs. This one's yours.

FAQ

Is this anti-app or anti-technology? No. The apps are clever businesses and driverless cars are a genuine advance. The point isn't to fight them — it's that drivers shouldn't be the only people in this industry without an asset to protect. Owning your customer relationship is that asset.

Are you saying the apps will definitely dump human drivers for robots? We're saying the incentive is there, and the ownership makes it likely wherever it's possible. Nobody can promise what any one company will do. But "the people who own the apps also build the driverless cars" is a fact — and it would be naïve to assume that won't shape how work gets routed.

Isn't driverless years away? Some of it — it's expensive and hard (GM spent billions and still paused its robotaxi unit). But the first commercial driverless services are launching now, not in a decade (see the Waymo post). The reason to prepare now is that building a customer book takes time — you want it built before you need it.

What can one driver do about giant car companies? Own your customers. You can't change what Geely or the apps do — but you can make yourself independent of it. A driver with a direct customer book doesn't care which car the app prioritises, because their passengers book them.

Does BAT.TAXI work with the driverless companies? No. BAT.TAXI is a pre-book booking system for human licensed drivers who want to own their own customers. It co-exists with whatever else ends up on the road — see Robotaxi vs Black Cab.

Ready to own your customers — before the driverless cars arrive? Join the London Taxi pre-launch waiting list →

Read more on the driverless future → bat.taxi/driverless-future