Color doesn't matter: taxi drivers on how much legal coloring costs

The number of "safe" cars that can legally carry out transportation may drop to a couple of thousand due to the introduction of new colors. Representatives of Perm taxi companies speak about it.

Alexander Galkin, a driver with 30 years of experience, has been working in the field of passenger transportation for almost five years. Now, according to new requirements, his red car should become not only completely white, but with a red chess “accent”. The price of repainting a car will cost almost a monthly income, or even two. On average, a taxi driver in Perm earns about 70 thousand rubles, excluding depreciation of the car and the price of fuel, the motorist emphasizes.

"Color does not matter! And painting one body element costs from 5 thousand rubles, you can count how many elements are on the body. Not uplifting because of this. It won’t pay off,” says Alexander Galkin, the driver of the taxi company “River” LLC.

Now all colored cars that do not fit the "single red and white dress code" are considered unsafe. The number of Perm taxis licensed this year has already reached 5,000. This is two times less than in previous years. In addition, now the number of “safe” machines that have received a license may even drop to a couple of thousand.

“If aggregators start to give orders only to licensed cars, then the price in the city of Perm will double, and in the region everyone will stand up, because the bulk of the Perm region are still colored cars,” emphasizes a representative of the public development council taxi in Perm and Perm region Andrey Petrov.

According to the statistics of the Ministry of Transport of the region, 97% of cars that have a license for transportation are already white. For such cars, a design change will cost about 3 thousand rubles, you need to put a red and white checker on the sides of the body. But, for example, for such a car, just changing the color will cost about 40 to 200 thousand rubles. and this is without taking into account small details: spoilers, handles, grilles, which ultimately will fall on the shoulders of entrepreneurs.
And if there are more than 150 cars in the taxi fleet, as in River LLC, then it is impossible to provide a single style for everyone at once. Among them, only one third fits within the scope of the law.

“If you take a Chinese film, this is 20 thousand rubles to re-glue the car. This is a simple promotional film. If this is already an auto film, then the gluing will “get up” up to 100 thousand rubles. Keeping it in a normal and glued, high-quality form will be very expensive,” added Dmitry Naumenko, DIRECTOR of the taxi fleet of River LLC.

Recall that a single color for a taxi, according to the regional authorities, was supposed to increase the growth of legal carriers in the region by 30%. In addition, according to Alexander Polygalov, Deputy Minister of the Regional Ministry of Transport, those taxi drivers who received a license before the law came into force will drive the color of the car for which they received permission. The innovation in regional legislation will come into force on September 1, 2022.