Inside the Mind of a Cabbie report to download

As part of the Shell Smarter Cab Drivers challenge – aimed at helping British drivers become more fuel efficient and save money by making simple changes to the way they drive – the Royal Society for the Arts (RSA) has been working with our cab drivers to better understand the factors that influence their everyday lives and which prevent them from making meaningful, sustained changes to their driving behaviour.

Following a series of workshops with the drivers, RSA has produced an interim study report ‘Inside the Mind of the Cabbie’ which explores the day-to-day issues they face in great detail and provides a series of initial recommendations and suggests as to how they can be influenced to drive more fuel-efficiently.

You can take a look at the RSA’s report by visiting the RSA’s website, or you can download the report directly from here.

Download the RSA's 'Inside the Mind of a Cabbie' report, commissioned by Shell

Our cabbies deliver fuel savings in just a fortnight

We’re very happy to say that our Smarter Cab Drivers fuel efficiency challenge has already delivered significant improvements for competing cab drivers across GB, saving them fuel and money and demonstrating the immediate impact of using our fuel efficiency tips and techniques.

By the halfway point of our challenge, our cab drivers had already delivered a 12 per cent average fuel efficiency improvement. If continued over the course of a year, this would mean they save around 600 pounds each on their fuel bills, based on their current fuel costs.*

The drivers are now split into two groups. Ten are continuing their efforts as normal, while the other ten are receiving special ‘interventions’ from the RSA designed to reinforce and refocus their efforts on applying the smarter driving tips. These interventions include a purpose-build ‘spring-o-meter’ – a dashboard mounted device that wobbles, and, if the cab in question is driven too harshly, sounds a beep – as well as in-cab guestbooks allowing passengers to provide feedback on how smooth their journey is. Have a look at a guestbook below:

The RSA has created special 'interventions' - in this case an in-cab guestbook - to help remind our drivers to stay fuel-efficient

*Based on 30.8 baseline mpg of all drivers before trial. Current 35.1 mg average of competing drivers at 500 miles per week average. Equates to 9 litres saving per week. At 1 pound 40 pence per litre equals annual potential saving of 652 pounds

Follow Smarter Cab Drivers on your website

To help you keep track of the latest updates from the Smarter Cab Drivers challenge, we’ve created a handy new widget to sit on your website or blog. The widget will update automatically with all of the breaking news, views and insights from our cabbies and challenge partners such as the RSA, the AA and the Energy Savings Trust, amongst others, allowing you to stay in touch with everything that’s happening in the challenge.

Displaying the widget is easy – simply click on the image below to get the widget code, then copy and paste the code into the sidebar of your website or blog.

RSA insight: The Week in Tweets

Jamie Young, Senior Research at The RSA:
The tweets from the drivers in the Smarter Cab Drivers Challenge reveal some of the stories behind the shifting leaderboard.

Before the challenge launched we had preparation, as Bernie checked his tyres, wound his windows up and took his golf clubs out of the boot. It was a strategy that seemed to pay off later on with unprecented fuel economy and a place at the top of the table. Bernie wasn’t the only happy one, with Arshad catching a lucrative job from Birmingham to Thorpe Park and one of Amar’s colleagues getting a fare from Nottingham to Blackpool – and Amar himself had a minor celebrity incident when he gave a lift to the Sri Lanka cricket coach.

One of the more unexpected events was the taxi driver protest in Nottingham. The drivers were protesting that they were no longer being allowed to wait on yellow lines when the rank around the station was full, asked instead to drive around continually or face an on-the-spot fine. The city’s cabbies took the change at face value, descending on the station and resulting in widespread congestion – a turn of events that cost Amar and Amer dear, resulting in some unhappiness until Amar managed to pull himself off the bottom of the table with an early rise and clear drive.

However, while the bottom of the leaderboard moved around, nothing was able to rearrange the top of the table, and the second week starts with Bernie still riding high.