warren t claim

So what was this plan then, Warren? We noticed that there was a large gap in the growing Asian driver market for hybrid automatics like the Prius and Auris. No taxi rental firm in our area offers these so we hatched our plan. Rather than go down my previous route of pulling Cat C/D cars straight we'd source our Toyotas either from auction or trade sources. The general idea was to get the bought, plated and rented out ASAP. As we were catering to a niche and captive market we believed that we could charge about £20 a week over the usual £100 rental taxi Mondeo price. After all, the driver will be saving a lot more than that in fuel costs. Along with renting out we'd also be selling them on the weekly and in this respect we'd be following my tried and trusted previous (and profitable) method of renting the car out for six months first to generate a minimum profit margin of £3000 for every car sold plus another grand added to our initial stand in price of the car. All repair costs could be deferred as extra payments on the end as long as the driver had the work done at the garage my mate had just bought. Another avenue of opportunity was us entering the insurance credit hire business. I've looked into this in the past and shied away from it due to having to be VAT registered and the fact that it takes a long time to get paid out which were both issues that my partner wasn't worried about as he has the money to be able to afford to wait to get paid. Insurance companies insist on a credit hire car being less than three years old so our plan was to use my Ioniq for that purpose and if it was out I'd just jump into whatever Prius/Aurus was available. At the time I knew a solicitor who was pretty open about the size of the brown envelope he received from his existing credit hire provider and if we were willing to beat their bribe he'd throw the work to us. To be continued....

Although current GF can't drive before I met her I had a fling with a lady who owned a Fiat Stilo. Maintaining a workable erection knowing that she'd just paid £2500 for the Fiat was somewhat of a challenge.

Back to the story. Before it was explained to me that my talents are probably best used elsewhere I had a flick through the application forms of our new breed of taxi drivers and noticed a couple of common denominators with our aspiring Asians. Firstly, most had only passed their test a year ago, and secondly, they all seemed to have passed in an automatic. This sprayed WD40 on the seized cogs that lurk within my brain. Wirral isn't Wimbledon, Wandsworth or Walthamstow. The vast majority of PH cars out there to rent are manuals unlike London minicabs as there's no fucking way any sane fleet owner who runs Mondeos would ever entertain having to deal with between 20 and 350 Ford Powershit autoboxes whilst still maintaining a profit. Even the few that had Passats and Octavias running DSG transmissions were having to bodge them with different oil to keep them on the road. I therefore hatched a plan so cunning even Baldrick would spaff in his strides...

Gotta love the clickbait title change! As not to totally derail our Mk1 Mondeo thread I'll lob a continuation to my foray as a local taxi fleet owner here. For the benefit of those who've not read my posts on that thread due to having no interest in Ford's family saloon from the early '90s here's a link. A good question to ask yours truly is whether I'd ever consider building up a rental fleet again and the correct answer is that I nearly did. Here's the story. Way back in 2003 when I started renting out taxis the vast majority of drivers owned their own cars and there were maybe a dozen lads who rented taxis out mainly to new drivers along with those who wanted fixed price weekly outgoings. Rental fleet sizes varied from 2 cars which is when a driver bought himself a new car and chose to rent his old car out to the large firm with about 25 cars on their fleet. This all changed when cars became common rail diesel powered and came with dual mass flywheels, particulate filters and EGR valves along with things like getting a fail for a TPMS, Airbag or EML light. Plenty of lads who had been owner drivers were scared of getting big bills and chose to follow the rental option. This meant that the guy with the fleet of 25 cars managed to grow to having maybe 350 cars out on hire, 90% of which were/are diesel Mondeos. About five years ago I was having a top level strategy drinking session with a friend who'd just sold his share in a specialised software company for a few million quid. He was pondering on whether starting a taxi firm would be a good idea and wanted my opinion. I told him not to waste his time and money but did suggest the following... As someone who has been in the trade for a long time I'm keen to notice trends and one thing that I had learned by looking at the intake of new drivers passing through our training school is that the vast majority were of Pakistani and Bangladeshi origin. About this time my firm made the mistake of thinking that WTC would be the ideal driver to talk to potential new drivers about taxi life and what to expect. Although the firm were pleased about how I deal with personal safety, they were less pleased with my mentoring when I explained the best way to torture a runner or the Warren T Claim guide to extracting a PIN number from someone who's puked in the back. To be continued...

"How did you keep a fleet of Mk1/2 Mondeos alive under hard use Warren?" is a question that maybe one or two of you might be semi curious to know the answer to. Most fleet owners who ran the same type of car worked on the total neglect basis due to them always having a dead car and a couple of spare engines. To them, a Pound spent on servicing was a Pound wasted. If a cambelt snaps then they'd just lob in another motor the following day. To me this seemed like hard work and I'd rather keep the fleet maintained so at lest I could have a life away from the taxi trade without getting called out to recover a dead car every week. Although my fleet was usually split 67% petrol and 33% diesel I ran the same service schedule regardless of motive power. Every car was treated to an oil change every six weeks and unless the car had a full service history prior to my ownership it'd get a new cam belt before it was either sold or rented out. Contrary to what you might think I didn't do oil changes myself. At the time Kwik Fit were really competitive on oil changes, especially on my Zetec petrol Mondeos. As everyone following this thread knows, the Zetec is a pretty fickle lump regarding oil and hates shit oil. This meant that every six weeks I'd tell the driver to get the oil changed at Kwik Fit, get a recept and I'd knock the cost of about £30 off their bill that week. One lad who had a non metallic red 2.0LX hatch off me decided to take the piss. He clearly had a mate who worked at Kwik Fit and for a few months chose to submit receipts for oil changes that hadn't happened. One day he brought his car back to me for front pads and after I'd fitted his brakes I did my usual trick of checking the fluid levels. His oil wasn't just like treacle, but low as well. What this lad didn't know was that at the time Kwik Fit didn't have a drum of Ford Zetec oil on site to do Mondeo oil changes. In fact they didn't even have 5 litre containers of oil to put in the sump. What they actually did was fill the engine using 1 litre bottles of oil and this meant that there was always half a bottle left that their servicing lad would leave in the boot as a top up between oil changes. Needless to say that despite his car allegedly having an oil change two weeks prior there was no half litre of oil in the boot. When I asked him when the last time he topped the oil up he told me that he hadn't needed to and when I enquired as to the whereabouts of the half litre of Zetec top up oil he had no fucking idea what I was talking about!

After seeing a similar Mk2 Ghia X trundling about today a long-forgotten memory about my similar car popped into my mental history. Rather than being sourced as a Cat C/D salvage this Mk2 came into my possession a slightly different way. I was presenting another Mondeo for test when a lad who I half knew who made his living supplying credit hire taxis at £80 a day to drivers who'd had a non fault accident approached me. He had the Ghia X on his fleet but had to pension it off due to the insurance companies insisting on him supplying cars less than three years old and would I be interested in buying it. He was asking £5000 for it which wasn't too bad at the time especially as it had something like eight months taxi plate left on it meaning that it'd be on my fleet the same day after the formality of transferring ownership details with the council. After some healthy negotiation, we agreed on £4500. Despite what you might think, I didn't have £4500 just sitting around waiting to be spent on Mondeos, drugs and slappers so we struck up a deal, £1500 down and £500 a week over the next six weeks which sounds like a lot but it was just about manageable for me at the time with six cars out on hire and another three being payed off on the weekly. The three I had out to drivers buying from me allowed me £300 a week and as long as none of my rental fleet needed anything major like a clutch then I'd be OK. What hurt was that I only had one final weeks £500 payment left when it was written off.

Are you saying that an Argenta or Croma is a better can than a Granada?

We need to remember that the Mondeo was introduced halfway through the K plate year.

Although over the years my fleet has included Aspen, LX, GLX, Si and Ghia models there are a few gaps that are triggering off my OCD. The fact that I've never owned a V6 isn't really that surprising due to my use case. After all, no sane driver would ever consider renting a V6 from me to do 50,000 mostly urban miles a year. I never owned a Ghia X TD either. There's a logical reason for this though. If I wanted a Mondeo with leather seats I'd have just bought a set of hide seats from a salvage yard and fitted them to a lower spec car. Other than the leather trim the only bonus of having a Ghia X is having both sunroof and aircon as the Ghia X in TD spec didn't come with cruise control. The only saloons I owned were a couple of Aspens and one solitary GLX TD. The biggest gap in my Mk1/2 CV is the fact that I've never owned, hired or rented out an estate. There's no logical reason for this as estate cars rent out easily. I've got nothing against estates. After all, I've had about half a dozen Mk4 estates, it's just that no estate appeared when I was Mondeo shopping.

A light metallic blue Zetec with the Escort GTI alloy wheels was on my want list to get plated and keep for myself. The problem was at the time they were the most sought-after model. IIRC, the Zetec specific grille cost something like £180 compared to £35 for the normal grille.

That looks saveable.

There may be a logical reason for this low mileage. The original owner may have had a company policy for vehicles that extended to on site vehicles that insisted on diesel, estate, ABS, Ford etc. I heard of a similar policy insisted on by a NHS trust that rented a Megane Scenic for six months and returned it with less than 50 miles on the clock.

I very much doubt that either of those Aspen diesels were mine The Verona TD surprises me because I didn't think that they were sold in TD variant. I'm sure that if they were I'd either have seen one advertised, bid on one at a salvage auction or known another driver who had one.

And Bullitt is a slow and boring film other than the chase scene.

@eddyramrod you need this in your life!

It's funny you should mention that. I've had colour grilled LXs but never any of them were Aspen spec cars. All my Mk2 Aspens were saloons and I'm certain that the newest was an S reg. Come to think of it, they were all diesels as well.

There's got to be an interesting story behind this. https://www.gumtree.com/p/ford/2000-ford-mondeo-1.8-lx-td-5dr-11500-miles-estate-diesel-mondeo-classic-with/1473877788

I'd forgotten how colour-coordinated the Mk1 was compared to the Mk2. That pic really does illustrate the superior quality of seat fabric the Mk1 had compared to its successor. The coin holder was useful in these. Whenever I was fobbed off with some foreign coins I'd ram them into the coin holder and see how low it took before an opportunistic light fingered punter stole them. Another Warren peculiarity was that I always made sure that I kept a half decent pen in the dedicated pen holder. No half chewed biro for me. Looking at that hardcore, held open, continental strength interior pic reminds me that if you drop anything like money between the front seat and centre console you should consider it lost forever. You will never see it again regardless of how determined you are. Using that space to slide your A to Z in helped stuff from dropping in there though.

@Minimad5 from where our former unit was.

MG6 is due its six monthly inspection and will need quite a few jobs sorting. I have this as a loan(?) car for a week or so. 265,000 miles and judging by the Cab Direct number plates, been working as a taxi all of its life. I suppose I should let you all know what my first impressions are. I should start by saying that my opinion so far is based on about thirty miles of gentle shuttling about on my Tradex policy. No combat miles as yet until I can swap my hire and reward insurance over tomorrow morning. I'll start by saying that the seating position is VERY low. I'm sure that there must be the facility to raise the driver's seat but as yet I can't find it. This can be an issue as because I have long legs and therefore in Focus sized cars I like to raise my seat to allow a little more rear legroom. The seat also seems to lack any lumbar support either which means that I've had to position the backrest a little more upright than I'd like. It's not as fast as the MG but has plenty enough power for the job, whilst driving unladen I'm changing up the box at the same speed as in the MG. I've yet to try it with a full compliment of people and luggage. I can't yet gather any MPG figures as it came with a quarter of a tank. The power steering has three assistance levels. 1. Very light. 2. Mk2 Punto with the "girly button" pressed. 3. 1977 XJ6. The turning circle is a hell of a lot better than the MG6. In fact, the MG needs Costa Concordia levels of space to spin around so that's no surprise. Ride quality is leagues ahead of the MG. The Kia rides as well as a modern Focus which is in stark contrast to the MG which absorbs bumps in a way that has me feeling nostalgic for my old XR3is. Internal storage is miles better than the MG. Instead of having one flimsy pop out cupholder that eats into the leg room of a front seat punter the Kia has two sensible centrally mounted holders to not just house a coffee, but also another to accommodate a packet of Hob Nobs to dunk into the aforementioned hot beverage. The Kia also has storage under the armrest that's at least triple the size of that of the MG. It also has a large central cubby, a feature absent on the MG6. The Kia lacks the automatic lights and wipers of the MG6. The leather seat trim of the MG6 is more "punter proof" than the cloth seats of the Kia. The Kia has a DAB radio. The MG6 has an AM/FM unit that doesn't work anyway. This isn't as bad as it sounds as I used a Bluetooth speaker to stream audio because the MGs Bluetooth isn't A2DP and only works for phone calls, not audio streaming. I've yet to check if the Kia is A2DP. The MG has built in sat nav, a feature missing on the Kia. As the MG navigation unit is so awkward to input a destination into as you can't search by postcode, this isn't too much of a loss. Anyway, I'm a taxi driver who should know where he's going anyway! The only useful feature of the MG sat nav was the display automatically told me what road I was currently on. So I suppose it's a case of swings and roundabouts. The next few days will decide which car makes the better taxi.

I often wonder how different my life would have turned out if I'd have got badged at 21.

I had an ex cab as a pizza delivery car back in the day but they were too old to be plated here when I started.

Another pretender to the crown that the taxi brokers tried to punt out was the Skoda Octavia. Not just any Octavia, but the non turbo SDI. Rather like Gareth Gates and Daniel Beddingfield, these heaps had their 15 minutes of fame back in 2003 before buyer's remorse hit in. They were cheap, very cheap for a new car at about £75 a week but that was about it. These things took close to twenty seconds to hit sixty with just the driver aboard. Throw a quartet of Birkenhead's chunkiest munters on board and I dread to think how slow they'd be. I remember driver's defending them saying that the Octavia is no slower than the old and missed Bluebird diesel but at least the Bluebird had toys to compensate. The SDI was equipped with keep fit windows and the only creature comfort was central locking. When someone phoned me asking to rent a Mondeo from me and the only one I had available was an Aspen base my reply would start with telling the driver that although I do have a Mondeo for rent I'm afraid it's only a base and doesn't have front electric windows but I'll put them top of the list when a higher spec car becomes available. The last thing I wanted was to prep a car only to have the driver fuck it off due to the DHSS spec! But at least the Mondeo Aspen came with a turbo! Anyway, those Mk1 Octavias soon fell out of favour. It's no good having a huge boot if it struggles to cope fully laden on an airport run but their biggest fault was the gearbox and its fondness for shitting itself. Without exception, every SDI suffered gearbox failure which Skoda/Taxi Dealer wasn't too keen to fix under warranty. Plenty were laid up at under two years old while the owner tried to source a good used box.

Gentlemen that reminds me. Taxi brokers and the local popularity of the 406. In the early 2000s the good people of Merseyside decided to wholeheartedly embrace the latest craze for putting in a personal injury claim in for just about anything. This caused taxi insurance to rocket from £33 to £91 a week. About this time a taxi broker in Scotland called Cab Direct decided to offer for sale brand new 406s for a reasonable amount that included free insurance. Plenty of local drivers took them up on their offer meaning that plenty of shiny new 406 HDi 90s appeared on our streets. This was probably the first time that local lads had sampled the common rail Pug lump and word soon went round telling tales of 55 mpg around the doors which only fuelled more sales. When the 406 was replaced with the 407 the driver rumour mill again went into overdrive but this time it was about the 407 needing to be main agent serviced and if it wasn't it'd go into limp mode 1000 miles after a service was due.

I know that it seems strange today in an era when any scruffy driver/petty criminal can waltz into a specialist taxi broker holding a sizeable deposit and walk out with a Hyundai Ioniq on finance, but twenty odd years ago getting a main dealer to flog a new car for taxi use on finance was unheard of. It's not that taxi drivers are a massive financial risk, plenty of us have mortgages through high street lenders. The main sticking point to the main agent lenders is the fact that if the car ever had to be snatched back the residual value would be even worse than normal. Lada would take a chance if a driver signed on the line for a new Riva but their lenders would NEVER repo a car anyway. They knew that they were worth fuck all used so preferred to make a deal with the buyer. Back in my reposession agent days I was not once asked to seize a Lada! That's not to say that nobody ever bought a new car to work as a taxi. The early to mid 2000s saw a surge in property prices meaning that quite a few drivers added the cost of a new Mondeo onto their mortgage. The knock on effect of restricted finance opportunities meant that mass market family saloons like the Mondeo took about three years to filter down to us taxi drivers. These cars were sourced either through lenders like Welcome Finance with the help of forged payslips and a dealer happy to look the other way or like yours truly, via salvage auctions and pulled straight. The Mk1/2 Mondeo was the perfect car to source as salvage due to their then huge sales volumes sold to fleets and ergo plentiful number meeting their demise on our extensive motorway network after the rep behind the wheel suffered a carb coma after spunking his Luncheon Vouchers on one too many Little Chef Olympic breakfasts. As a salvage buyer, a major Mondeo plus point compared to say the equivalent Vauxhalls or Rovers (believe it or not, the 400 was briefly popular as a taxi here at one point) is that the Mondeo can take a pretty big shunt without deploying its airbag. They also had the ability to be pulled straight without the need for a jib, a simple Porta Power would usually suffice although sometimes it was just easier to buy a new rear panel from Ford to save hours of labour. Although most of my Mondeo's were rebuilt write offs I can honestly say that not one of them was a cut and shut. I left that for the lads punting on 406s. In fact it wasn't unusual to see a couple of lads pushing the back end of a 406 down the back streets of Birkenhead like Smithfield Market barrow boys. One particular 2.0LX I had turned out to have the last owner live in my area despite me having to have the car transported from the salvage yard in the Midlands. I remember this Pepper Red (I must've had at least four Mk2s in that colour) example because the previous owner had fitted a nice set of Focus alloys.. Once repaired and back on the road I decided to knock on the previous owner's door. He couldn't believe that it was back on the road after it was hit from behind in standstill M56 traffic by a BMW which launched him into theTransit in front. If seeing his old car again made him happy that was nothing compared to his delight when I handed him his Shania Twain CD that was in the CD player when I got the car! It's funny that the only privately owned salvage Mondeo I bought was a local car. Every other car had the name of a leasing company as the previous owner with the exception of two that had been owned by Trinity Mirror.