LM: What are your top three favourite travel destinations?
Jonny: The Lake District, where my family always meets up over Christmas week. It’s great to know, whatever else happens in the year, we’ll be together to enjoy the great outdoors as well as good pies and ales! South America is also very close to my heart, both because my wife and I honeymooned in Argentina and Brazil, and because I’ve never met happier or friendlier people than there.
LM: Where would you like to travel next?
Jonny: I’ve never been to Rome, Berlin or Santiago de Compostela. There is so much I’d love to see and learn in all those places – and hopefully I’d have the energy to enjoy the nightlife a bit too.
LM: At Green Tomato Cars you plant almost 200 trees a year in locals parks as part of your Trees for Cities Partnership. Tell us a little more about this initiative.
Jonny: We have a partnership with Trees for Cities, planting trees across London. The trees are planted in London parks, and as well as the obvious environmental and aesthetic benefits, staff also get to volunteer to help with the planting – which makes for plenty of sociable fun and a great chance to get to know London better.
LM: I am told at Green Tomato Cars if you transport a mother in labour to the hospital you plant a tree and name it after the baby? How did you come up with this concept and how many trees have you planted and named so far?
Jonny: This is something we came up with in the earliest days of Green Tomato Cars. We heard wonderful stories back from new parents who’d used Green Tomato Cars to get them to a hospital when the mother-to-be went into labour.
We wanted to do something to celebrate the occasion, and the concept of planting trees fits perfectly with the ideas of new life and environmental responsibility. Last time I checked, we’d planted about 30 trees – primarily in the Caledonian forests – each paired with a certificate to the proud parents. People reading this in years to come might even get to visit their own tree!
LM: How do you choose your vehicles so they are not damaging the environment? What are the criteria used to select a Green Tomato Car?
Jonny: We operate up to 600 vehicles at any time. Two-thirds of our fleet are Toyota Prius and the balance is made up of zero-emission vehicles including the Toyota Mirai, Hyundai Ioniq and Tesla S, and some clean diesel technology executive cars and people carriers.
Our criteria for vehicle choice are simple – the least polluting vehicles that do the job. Of course, we have to balance cost and operational issues, hence not having a full fleet of Teslas.
In terms of diesel, we started using these because we needed to offer a people carrier and executive car solution as well as our classic Prius, but there were no suitable hybrids. So we ran some diesel vehicles using bio-diesel from recycled cooking oil, which was a great fit ecologically. Unfortunately, the vehicles we used weren’t up to the job in terms of their robustness, so we had to move to a more conventional diesel option – albeit using clean diesel technology.
However, we’ve now resolved to move away from diesel altogether. We will be de-fleeting all our diesel cars over the course of 2018 and be replacing them with zero emission or hybrid equivalents.
We were the first taxi company in Europe to take on two Toyota Mirai hydrogen fuel cell cars, which only emit water from the tailpipe. We’ve been delighted with these cars and in fact, we’ve just reached a milestone as one of our Mirais has just clocked up 50,000 miles of fault-free service on London’s streets. In two years on the road, the car has proved utterly reliable and has produced no polluting emissions. In fact, the only by-product from Mirai’s onboard electric power generation system has been pure water – around 6,450 litres, or enough to fill more than 80 domestic bathtubs.
LM: What makes a Green Tomato Cars driver and why are they so integral to the company?
Jonny: We are really proud of our family of drivers and the quality of the service and the attention to detail they show every day. They are the face of our business and we respect them as such.
Driver recruitment is a very thorough process that includes a comprehensive interview, reference checking and then an induction programme. Only those with the highest standards are taken on to drive for us. Telematics devices are fitted in our vehicles and these provide constant visibility and feedback on driving standards. This not only enables us to offer a better, safer passenger journey but also allows us to tailor training for the drivers’ on-going personal development.
Many of our drivers have been with us for more than 5 years, and some have gone on to work in our office and management teams. One of our drivers won the UK Private Hire Driver of the Year award in 2014 – we’ve won cabinets-full of awards over the years, but that was the single proudest moment for Green Tomato Cars.
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