Wel­ling­ton’s “ol’ faith­ful” taxi-cab com­pany Com­bined (or Wel­ling­ton Com­bined Tax­is to give them their full title) have gone through a bit of a trans­form­a­tion in the last 12 months or so.

With the arrival on the scene of new “green” play­er Green Cabs (about whom we have writ­ten – and been wit­ness to some con­tro­versy – in the past), I guess they were faced with the choice of adapt­ing, or get added to the bot­tom of the endangered spe­cies list.

Hap­pily (for them, us, con­sumer choice AND the plan­et that we share) they chose the former.

Read on after the jump to find out what they have been up to..

Early last year, Wel­ling­ton Com­bined Tax­is made a strong com­mit­ment to address the envir­on­ment­al impact of their busi­ness.  Firstly, they ruled that from mid-2008 no more pet­rol-only vehicles will be per­mit­ted join their taxi fleet (around 450 cars). In addi­tion, they have under­taken to ensure that by the begin­ning of 2014, their entire fleet will con­sist of vehicles which are more fuel-effi­cient than reg­u­lar pet­rol-fueled mod­els. 

Just 18 months in, they already have over a third of their fleet con­form­ing to their new stand­ard, with nearly 50 hybrids, and five i30 dies­els with sim­il­ar fuel-effi­ciency pro­files to the hybrids. They also run a decent num­ber of big­ger vehicles like the Son­ata dies­el cabs, which are still very effi­cient com­pared to pet­rol vehicles but provide a decent amount of leg-room in the back – some­thing that will come as music to the ear of many pas­sen­gers.

Com­bined have been encour­aged by the feed­back from the pub­lic which has deservedly been very pos­it­ive, but the pro­cess has­n’t been without one or two set­backs. In March 2008 they were the sub­ject of a “gre­en­wash­ing” invest­ig­a­tion by the Com­merce Com­mis­sion over claims that they were pub­lish­ing false and mis­lead­ing inform­a­tion on their web­site – spe­cific­ally about LPG tax­is redu­cing car­bon diox­ide pol­lu­tion, and the fuel effi­ciency of Nis­san Max­ima engines. Pen­al­ties for breach­ing the Fair Trad­ing Act include fines of up to $200,000 for a com­pany.

Sev­er­al months later Com­bined were issued with a warn­ing by the Com­mis­sion and advised to change their com­pli­ance pro­ced­ures to ensure future rep­res­ent­a­tions are accur­ate. Com­bined them­selves reck­on they fell vic­tim to the (unfor­tu­nately not uncom­mon) trap of rely­ing on the accur­acy of inform­a­tion sup­plied by vendors, but regard the whole thing as a use­ful learn­ing exper­i­ence for the com­pany. Tak­ing the Com­mis­sion’s advice they have tightened up their busi­ness pro­cesses to pre­vent a recur­rance. 

There’s been anoth­er pos­it­ive out­come, too. It took them two years of hard work, a lot of edu­ca­tion and no small amount of ded­ic­a­tion but with the sup­port of Land­care Research – Com­bined attained car­boNZero CertTM cer­ti­fic­a­tion, the first New Zea­l­and taxi ser­vice to do so. (Are they the only? It’s hard to loc­ate anoth­er.) They meet the require­ments of the car­boNZero CertTM cer­ti­fic­a­tion hav­ing meas­ured and com­mit­ted to redu­cing their green­house gas emis­sions, and then mit­ig­at­ing remain­ing unavoid­able emis­sions in respect of their organ­isa­tion – includ­ing the vehicle fleet, office admin­is­tra­tion, and staff air travel. They’re also the only taxi ser­vice in the Wel­ling­ton region (not to men­tion the entire coun­try) lis­ted on Green­list, the Sus­tain­able Busi­ness Net­work’s dir­ect­ory of sus­tain­able products and ser­vices. (Huh? No Green Cabs?)

Old dogs are pro­ver­bi­ally known for their inab­il­ity to learn new tricks, but “ol’ faith­ful” Wel­ling­ton Com­bined Tax­is appear to have done just that. Their fleet is con­stantly chan­ging and upgrad­ing to new­er, more fuel-effi­cient vehicles, and they closely fol­low devel­op­ments in vehicle and fuel-effi­ciency tech­no­logy look­ing for more effi­cient mod­els they can allow into their fleet. They’ve decided to do some­thing for the envir­on­ment, and they’re in it for the long haul. (Is it also the com­mer­cially-savvy decision? Pos­sibly. Either way, I reck­on it’s the right one.) Good on them! Shake hands? Good dog.