Meridian Cars had run the same dispatch system for eleven years. It worked — until it didn't. Driver numbers were flat, fuel was up, and the owners could feel margin leaking somewhere they couldn't name. A two-week instrumentation exercise gave it a name: 38% of every mile driven was empty.
The problem hiding in plain sight
Their legacy dispatch assigned the nearest idle car to every job. Simple, but it ignored where a driver was about to finish — so cars were routinely sent back across town for a pickup a colleague had just dropped beside. On a busy Friday the fleet was, in effect, paying for a phantom shift of empty driving.
- Approach mileage averaged 4.1 km per job — well above the 2.5 km their geography justified.
- Drivers drifted back to the city-centre rank between jobs, creating convoys of empty cars.
- No baseline existed: the owners had never separated approach mileage from idle return mileage.
What we changed
Migration took twelve days, run in parallel with the old system for the first week so no booking was ever at risk. The dispatch logic changed in three steps: forward-looking assignment that scored drivers on their projected drop-off point, job chaining that pre-committed a car to a nearby pickup before it went idle, and a redrawn zone map built from their own demand heatmap rather than habit.
Bringing the drivers along
The configuration wins would have evaporated if drivers had rejected chained jobs to chase the rank. The live driver wallet did the persuading: once a driver could see that the chained job earned more per hour than driving back empty, the behaviour fixed itself. Acceptance rates rose in the first fortnight and stayed there.
The result, one quarter on
Dead mileage fell from 38% to 26% — a 31% reduction — inside ninety days. With fuel and driver pay both pinned to distance, that recovered roughly 5% of monthly revenue straight to the bottom line. Meridian has since paused a planned fleet expansion: the capacity they needed was already on the road, just driving empty.
We thought we needed more cars. We actually needed the cars we had to stop driving empty. The dead-mileage number was the most honest thing anyone had ever shown us about our own business.
Meridian Cars · Manchester, United Kingdom
