Our new electric cabs have also helped. The fleet is more than 54pc electric. People absolutely love them. They have this big glass roof – they’re electric, totally silent, really comfortable, unlike the bouncy diesel cabs we used to drive.
You can earn very good money as a black cab driver. I’ve got friends who have put their kids through public school and university and have multi-million pound houses – and they’ve done all that driving a black cab. But it all depends on you.
I did the Knowledge with a guy who lived in a council flat in Hackney and he’s still in that council flat. Some people worked all the hours God sent and other people never went to work. That’s the deciding factor.
My best year would have been in the late 1980s when I cleared £50,000 a year – in today’s money that’s about £170,000. Today, a black cab driver, who works six days a week, doesn’t take many holidays, will earn about £100,000 a year.
One of the biggest issues in the industry at the moment is how many cab drivers are having to register for VAT because they earn over £85,000 a year.
During a weekday, we are looking to gross £35 to £40 an hour. On weekends and at nights, I’d want to gross at least £50 an hour. I only go out in my cab about one day a week now – last year, that made me about £20,000.
You can either rent a cab or purchase one. An owner-driver is called a musher. Cab drivers have their own language. For example a droshky is a cab, from the Russian word for carriage, a sherbet is another name for cab, from Cockney rhyming slang “sherbet dab”.
About 55pc of cabbies are mushers and 45pc rent cabs. If you rent, you will probably pay about £350 a week. To buy a cab outright is about £70,000, so most people buy them on a Personal Contract Plan. That would probably cost you about £250 a week.
The cabs are electric, so you have to charge them. If you have a home charger and you arrange a night tariff where after midnight you pay hardly anything for electricity, you can get away with charging it for a fiver. If you charge it on the street, you can pay anything up to £30.
When you drive a cab, you pick up all sorts of people, from the very elite in society to an office cleaner who is running late and has missed the bus. I’ve had movie stars and pop stars in the back of my cab. Michael Caine was always in and out of black cabs. I saw him all the time.
One time, I picked up Robert De Niro and I decided to have a little joke about his role in Taxi Driver. When he told me the location, I said, “You talking to me?”. He just looked confused and I felt mortified.
But when I told him we had arrived at his drop-off, he was right by the glass partition and he just screamed: “You talking to me?”. He got out, doubled up with laughter and handed me a £20 note as a tip.
I was clearly not the only cab driver who thought he could parrot the movie star’s most famous line back at him.