It is the second question almost everyone asks, straight after the price. The unsatisfying but accurate answer is that there is no minimum fleet size that suits every brand, because the right number falls out of three other decisions rather than being set independently.
The number is an output, not an input
Fleet size is determined by your budget, your format and your run length working against each other. Fix any two and the third is decided for you. A budget spent on Supersides buys considerably more cabs than the same budget spent on Full Wraps. The same budget spread over twelve months buys fewer cabs than it does over three.
So the useful conversation is not "how many cabs do I need" but "what am I trying to achieve, and which shape of campaign gets me there".
Sizing for reach and frequency
If the objective is awareness across a city, you want the largest fleet the budget will support, which almost always means Supersides. What you are buying is frequency — the same commuters encountering your message on different vehicles, in different streets, on different days. A single cab, however striking, cannot deliver that. Ten can begin to.
Because cabs move continuously rather than sitting at a site, a taxi fleet builds coverage faster per vehicle than an equivalent number of static panels. That is the medium’s genuine structural advantage, and it argues for spending the budget on vehicles rather than on coverage per vehicle.
Sizing for standout
If the objective is impact — a launch, a market entry, something you want photographed — the calculation inverts. A small number of fully wrapped cabs will read as a far larger campaign than the fleet size suggests, because each vehicle is unmissable and because wrapped cabs get shared.
Campaigns of this shape run on notably smaller fleets than awareness campaigns, and it is not a compromise. Spreading the same budget thinly across many Supersides would produce a campaign nobody photographs.
Coverage is organic, not targeted
One thing worth being straight about, because it changes how you should size a campaign: a standard advertising fleet cannot be guaranteed or weighted by borough or by driver shift pattern. These are working taxis, and they go where the working day takes them.
That means fleet size is doing more work than placement. You are buying broad, organic coverage of a city, so the number of vehicles is the main lever you have over how often your audience meets the campaign. If you need a taxi in a specific place at a specific time, that is private taxi hire rather than fleet advertising.
Run length changes the number
Print and fitting are one-off costs whatever the length of the campaign, so a longer run spreads them further and lowers the effective monthly rate. That means a twelve-month campaign supports a larger fleet per pound than a three-month burst of the same total value.
If the campaign is not tied to a fixed moment, extending the run is often the cheapest way to buy more vehicles.
A practical way to decide
- Write down the objective in one sentence. Awareness, launch, recruitment, market entry.
- Decide whether that objective is served by being seen often or by being unmissable.
- That answers the format question: often means Supersides, unmissable means Full Wraps.
- Fix your budget and your dates.
- Ask for the fleet size those three produce — and for the alternative shape, so you can see the trade-off in real numbers.
Get the numbers for your campaign
We will size the fleet against your budget and objectives before you commit to anything, and show you what the same money buys in each format. Tell us the brief, or read more on choosing between the two formats.