Designed by Londoners, for Londoners, Miwhip's gold-wrapped supercar minicab service is here to take over.
Today marks the launch of Miwhip—an app that was created to bring a new energy to the streets of London. The service will give the chance for the average person to ride in a supercar minicab. The app will be available for you to download from today, and will officially begin in six weeks' time.
The business will entail a two-fold system, including the Miwhip supercar lottery and the loyalty reward. With the lottery part, it will give the chance for a random person to win a ride in a supercar and with the loyalty part, Miwhip will reward their customers by giving them a ride in a supercar after a certain amount of rides. The gold-wrapped supercar cabs, which include the Lamborghini Aventador, Rolls Royce Ghost II, Ferrari 488, Mercedes G Wagon and McLaren 720s, will be spotted across every LDN postcode over the coming weeks.
Complex went down to the launch event and got to speak with Nohman, one of the owners of the family business, about the concept of the brand before the take over commences.
COMPLEX: What inspired you to create the Miwhip app in the first place?
Nohman: We grew up with our dad being a mini-cab driver and, growing up, we would watch his whole day balancing his work with his family life. He would start the day by waking us up, then he would take and pick us up from school and then at the end of the day, he would have dinner with us before going to work. His hardworking ethic was the inspiration behind the brand—sadly he passed away 8 years ago—so the Miwhip app is our way of paying homage to him.
Did the idea take influence from Uber?
Well, we are constantly researching. We've been working behind the scenes on this for years in order to fully understand the market. In terms of looking at competitors, it's all about taking influence from what they have done well and implementing them into our own brand.
How accessible will this be to the average person?
The pledge we've made with our customers, is that 1 in every 100 trip will be a supercar. This will work through two systems: the lottery reward is where 1 in every 100 rides booked on the Miwhip app will be picked at random to drive a supercar, and then we will also have a loyalty reward for our users where, after 100 trips, you'll be gifted with a ride in one of our supercars. We've already got several thousand drivers signed up and when we launch in about six weeks' time, we should have 5,000 drivers signed up to the company. By the end of 2019, we're aiming to have 10,000 drivers and along with this, we should have 200 supercars and 200 Mione smart cars on the road by then.
What features will make you standout amongst your competitors?
Apart from our unique supercar approach, we also have an option called Mione, which is only gold smart cars; once again, you are getting the VIP treatment with our service. They're going to be operating in Zone 1, so essentially, you can go from Kensington to Whitechapel and only end up paying a fiver.
From starting the lifestyle brand, Crep Protect, what are the lessons that you have learned from that business that you take over to Miwhip?
We learnt how to connect directly with consumers; we learnt how to find out exactly what they want through keeping a close relationship with them, and what we'll also bring to the Miwhip brand is that we'll be completely disruptive to the industry.
Explain the lottery and loyalty booking—what's the idea behind it?
We believe it's very important that we bring in the surprise aspect of the lottery reward to our brand. But at the same time, many people buy lottery tickets and lose, so we want to make sure that we also reward our customers for being loyal to us.
With the drivers, how will you make sure that they are vetted?
First of all, TFL license the drivers and the vehicles. Then in terms of the superfleet drivers, we will take the best and most experienced drivers and even if they've got amazing qualifications, we will put them all through a bespoke training programme, so that they are all more than capable of driving the specific car they will be using. On top of this, just to make sure that our passengers feel safer, we are going to equip all our vehicles with internal and external CCTV.
With all the licensing issues that Uber ran into, what will you do to ensure that Miwhip doesn't have the same fate?
We've taken on board the problems that others have had and what we've done is start from scratch, by speaking to key figures in the industry and understanding what works well. We've been in talks with TFL, telling them everything we are going to do and on the basis of that, they've given us our license.
Lastly, all these new cars on the road will most likely cause more damage to the environment because of the CO2 emissions, so what do you have in mind to counter balance this?
What we are doing with our 10,000 drivers is taking market shares. So we're not really adding any new drivers to the road. Also, the commitments we've given to TFL are that by January 1, 2022, none of our supercars will be diesel. As well as this, by 2025, all of our cars will be hybrid electric cars.
