Las Vegas Taxi Company Orders Hundreds Of Teslas
Credit to Author: Zachary Shahan| Date: Tue, 07 Jan 2020 03:34:03 +0000
Published on January 6th, 2020 | by Zachary Shahan
January 6th, 2020 by Zachary Shahan
It has long seemed to me that the Tesla Model 3 (or Tesla Model X if in the right price class) is more than competitive in the taxi market, or any other high-mileage market. Generally speaking, the more you drive a vehicle, the more money an electric vehicle is going to save you. So, I’ve been a bit surprised to not see more large orders of the Tesla Model 3 for taxi or other transportation service companies. From what I can tell, the Tesla Model 3 even makes sense for normal, not-so-high-milage drivers. When you’re in the drive-all-day-and-(maybe)-night business, the cash consideration becomes stronger.
Well, it appears the idea is starting to catch on. Perhaps most of these companies simply wanted to see proof of decent reliability, low ownership costs, and durability. Some initial Consumer Reports research found a lot of Model 3 service issues, but as time has gone on, it appears those problems have dwindled away for new car purchases. (Not to say there won’t always be some problematic cases.) Two days ago, we reported on a German taxi operator ordering 50 Tesla Model 3s. Now we find out that a Las Vegas company has that order beat.
Kaptyn, a Transportations as a Service (TaaS) technology company in Las Vegas, today launched 30 Teslas in its on-demand transportation (i.e., taxi) service in Vegas. The main hub for the Kaptyn service will be McCarran International Airport. Naturally, the announcement coincides with CES 2020, since it makes so much sense to break news when every other tech company in the world is breaking news. (But hey, we’re covering it, aren’t we? And thanks to Daryl Elliott for passing along the story.)
Initially, I thought, “That’s a big order. We should probably cover that.” As I jumped into the story, though, I saw it was about much more than 30 Teslas. This taxi company has 872 taxis, and 1,400 vehicles in total. The 30 Tesla Model 3s it launched today aren’t the end of the road — they’re basically just a soft launch. The number of electric vehicles in the fleet will be in the hundreds by sometime in February, if all goes according to plan. The fleet will include Model 3, Model X, and Model S vehicles. Furthermore, the company already has ~100 chauffeurs trained to drive the Teslas. (Not that it requires a lot of training.) Before too long, Vegas may look like a satellite extension of Tesla Gigafactory 1 or the Tesla factory in Fremont, California.
What will Kaptyn do if/when Tesla launches Full Self Driving in Nevada? I assume the company would just install the update, activate the Tesla Network option (which may have a different name when it goes live), and start running the service without drivers.
We will follow up soon to find out if the February target is hit, and how the service is going in its first phase.
But the question is: will passengers accept the Teslas?
Hehe — just kidding. Of course they’ll love them!
Image courtesy Kaptyn
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Zachary Shahan is tryin’ to help society help itself one word at a time. He spends most of his time here on CleanTechnica as its director and chief editor. He’s also the CEO of Important Media. Zach is recognized globally as an electric vehicle, solar energy, and energy storage expert. He has presented about cleantech at conferences in India, the UAE, Ukraine, Poland, Germany, the Netherlands, the USA, Canada, and Curaçao. Zach has long-term investments in Tesla [TSLA] — after years of covering solar and EVs, he simply has a lot of faith in this company and feels like it is a good cleantech company to invest in. But he offers no investment advice and does not recommend investing in Tesla or any other company.