Coaster, Hiace or coach: choosing a vehicle for staff transport

A company moving staff asks one question first: how many people. It is the wrong place to start, and it is why so many staff transport contracts are quietly wasteful within six months.

The right question is how many people, on which route, at which times, from which doors. Here is how that decides the vehicle.

The three options, honestly

Hiace, 13 to 15 seats. Narrow enough for inner-city streets and residential lanes where a coaster has to stop at the corner and make everybody walk. Fastest to load and unload. The cheapest to run per kilometre by a wide margin.

Coaster, 22 seats. The workhorse of staff transport in Pakistan, and most of our own fleet. It fits more than twice the Hiace's load without being a bus to drive, and it will get down most roads a car can.

Intercity coach, 40 to 45 seats. For a long, straight run with few stops. On a city route it will spend its day turning around.

The mistake that costs the most

Picking by headcount alone, and buying one vehicle too large.

A 30-person route looks like a coach and a bit, or two coasters. Two coasters almost always win, and not because of the seats:

• Two routes instead of one. Thirty people rarely live in one direction. Two vehicles pick up two clusters and both arrive on time. One vehicle collects everyone in sequence, and the first person aboard spends ninety minutes travelling to work.
• One breakdown is half a problem. If a single vehicle carries the whole shift, a puncture is thirty people late.
• The empty seats cost fuel every day. A coach at 60% occupancy burns a coach's diesel.

The seats are the cheapest part of the decision. The route is the expensive part.

When the coach is right

On a genuinely long single leg — a factory 60 kilometres out of the city, one pickup point, one drop — the coach wins on every count. Fewer drivers, fewer vehicles, lower cost per head. The thing that makes it wrong in the city is the thing that makes it right here: it does not want to stop.

What to check before signing anything

• Replacement vehicle. Not whether they have spares, but what happens at 7am on the day one fails, in writing.
• Driver continuity. Staff transport runs on the driver knowing the route and the people. A contract that rotates drivers weekly will be late.
• What a "day" is. Some contracts count hours, some count trips. A route that drifts half an hour later costs nothing under one and a great deal under the other.
• How consumption is treated. On a fixed monthly fee, a fuel price rise is the operator's problem. On a fuel-inclusive per-kilometre rate, it is yours. Neither is wrong; know which one you signed.

Where to start

Send the route — the pickup points, the times and the headcount at each — rather than a total. We will come back with the vehicle mix and what it costs, and often the answer is one fewer vehicle than people expect.

The corporate page has the request form, and it asks for exactly those details.