Taxi fleet tracking in Malta, down to the driver
Already running Yipii in Malta and Gozo
Where a taxi operation runs on guesswork
Four things come up in most conversations we have with an operator running cars in Malta, whether that is five of them or fifty.
Nobody knows which car is nearest
A hotel in Sliema wants a car now. Whoever picks up the phone rings round three drivers, or sends the one who answered last, because the position of every other car is a memory of where it said it was an hour ago.
The score belongs to the registration
Three drivers share one car across a day. The kilometres, the harsh braking on the Marsa roundabout and the whole behaviour record land on the plate, so a good driver and a heavy one average out into one meaningless figure.
A complaint with nothing behind it
A passenger says the driver took the long way round from the airport and drove like it. The driver says otherwise. Without a trail and a timestamp, you are settling it on personality, and you settle it against whoever complains loudest.
Month end gets rebuilt by hand
Kilometres per car, hours each one worked, which driver had which vehicle. Somebody assembles it from a diary, a WhatsApp thread and the odometer readings they remembered to take.
One shift, and the report on Friday
Times are an example. What matters is the order things happen in, and every step below is a screen somebody at your desk can open.
- 106:20
The driver starts a shift
The driver touches an iButton to the reader in the cab, or the Bluetooth tag on their keyring is picked up passively as they get in. From that moment every trip, every harsh event and the score behind them belong to that driver rather than to the car.
- 208:40
A hotel wants a car now
The desk opens the live map. Green arrows are moving, yellow circles are idling, grey ones are parked, and a moving car refreshes its position every 10 to 30 seconds. The desk sends whichever car is closest, and nobody rings round to find it.
- 311:15
The car changes hands
A second driver takes the same vehicle for the afternoon. Their tag moves the record onto them with nothing typed and nobody picked from a list. One thing to watch: a tag that has been registered but never assigned to a person names nobody, and the trips stay on the car.
- 413:30
A booking for later that day
The customer gets a tracking link on a page carrying your brand name, your logo and your colour. They watch the car approach on a map. It does not show them the driver, any other car in your fleet, or yesterday's trips, and it carries no arrival estimate.
- 517:50
Something happens on the coast road
A speed threshold is crossed and the alert reaches you by email while the car is still moving. Harsh braking above 2.5 m/s² is logged with its GPS position, so the complaint that arrives tomorrow morning has a place and a time against it.
- 6Friday
The desk exports the week
Trip, mileage, driver activity and driver behaviour come out as PDF or Excel, one report covering up to 31 days. Set them to arrive daily, weekly or monthly to whoever needs them and nobody has to remember to run anything.
What you pay depends on how many vehicles you run and what you fit to them. Tell our Malta team both and we will quote it.
Ask for a quoteWhat taxi fleet tracking in Malta runs on
Six of these come from the tracking account and one from the Mobility app. Read the packaging line under them before you build a budget around any single card.
- Driver IDAn iButton touched to a reader, or a Bluetooth tag read passively within about 10 metres. Without one, the score stays on the car.Yipii IoT
- Live Share TrackingA link for a booked customer, on a page carrying your brand name, logo and colour. Three links run free per account.Yipii IoT add-on
- AlertsSpeed thresholds per car, and movement outside the hours you set. Email is free, SMS and WhatsApp cost 1 to 3 credits a message.Yipii IoT
- MaintenanceService reminders by date or by mileage, which matters when a cab covers a year of ordinary driving in four months.Yipii Mobility
The live map, driver scoring, reporting, alerts and driver ID are part of Yipii IoT, the core tracking account, with the tags and readers quoted as hardware alongside it. Sharing links are an IoT add-on, and every account gets three active ones before that costs anything. Service reminders are the one item here that comes from Yipii Mobility, and Mobility is bought whole: one add-on subscription covering the entire app, sitting on top of an IoT account. There is no way to buy the service reminders on their own.
Included with Yipii Mobility, the add-on that extends your IoT account. One subscription covers everything in the app, so no feature here is sold on its own. What Yipii Mobility includes
A tracker that suits the car, and a tag that names the driver
A cab is a car, so the quickest route onto the map is a Teltonika FMB003 or FMC003 in the diagnostic port under the dash. It takes under a minute, needs no tools, and moves to another car when you sell that one, which is why hire fleets like it on vehicles they would rather not modify. The honest limit is that anything plugged in can be unplugged, so cars you own and want tracked whatever the driver thinks get a hardwired FMB120 or FMC130 class unit instead. On top of either, an iButton reader or a Bluetooth beacon is what puts the trip on a person. Some operators also ask about a car that starts only once an authorised card or tag is presented. We fit that, and we would rather walk through it on your own vehicles than write a specification here that our documentation does not yet carry.
- Teltonika FMB003 or FMC003 in the OBD port, fitted in under a minute
- Hardwired FMB120 or FMC130 class where a driver should not be able to unplug it
- An iButton reader or a Bluetooth beacon so the trip lands on the driver
- A Yipii multi-network SIM that switches between GO, Melita and Epic
Twelve cars, and the arithmetic under them
The model below runs a twelve-car operation across a year, with every assumption showing. Read the fuel row closely before you take the total seriously. It uses 10 per cent, the bottom of the 10 to 40 per cent reduction our driver scoring documentation claims for coaching, and it counts only the four drivers you would actually sit down with.
Four levers on a twelve-car operation over a year. The biggest is desk time, and the fuel row only happens if somebody does the coaching.
Until a car has a driver tag in it, every number here belongs to the plate.
| Lever | Assumption | Over a year |
|---|---|---|
| Fuel, after coaching the four lowest scores | 4 cars at 30,000 km a year, 7 litres per 100 km, €1.55 a litre, cut by 10 per cent | €1,302 |
| Ringing round to find the nearest car | 20 minutes of desk time a day over 300 working days, at €14 an hour | €1,400 |
| Month-end figures assembled by hand | 5 hours a month pulling kilometres and hours together, over 12 months, at €18 an hour | €1,080 |
| A complaint settled on the trail | One a month at €35 of refunded fare or goodwill, over 12 months | €420 |
Two things the table leans on. The fuel row assumes driver tags are fitted first, because coaching a score that belongs to a registration coaches nobody. And 300 working days is a taxi assumption rather than an office one, so a roster that runs seven days moves the desk row up. Illustrative arithmetic, not a measured customer outcome.
Frequently asked
It depends on how many cars you run, whether they take a plug-in tracker or a hardwired one, how many of them need a driver tag fitted, and whether you want SMS or WhatsApp alerts on top of the free email ones. We quote per fleet rather than publishing a price list, because a five-car operation and a fifty-car one buy very different amounts of it. Tell us the number of cars and how many drivers share them, and we will come back with a figure and a fitting date.
Yes, once the car carries a driver tag, and this is the single thing most worth getting right on a taxi fleet. An iButton is a coin-sized metal tag on a keyring, touched to a reader wired to the tracker at the start of a shift. A Bluetooth beacon does the same job passively, picked up by the tracker within about 10 metres, which suits an operation where drivers swap cars mid-shift. After that there is no admin: the trip, the harsh events and the score follow whoever the tag belongs to. Without a tag, everything Yipii measures belongs to the vehicle, so a car shared by three drivers produces one score covering all three. Fitting is per car, so start with the ones that are genuinely shared.
It gives you the records to work from, and we will not overstate it beyond that. Yipii produces trip logs, mileage per vehicle, driver activity and driver behaviour reports, which are the reports many fleets use to support their Transport Malta processes, exported to PDF or Excel or scheduled to arrive on their own. What Yipii is not is an approval, a licence or a compliance guarantee, and no tracker makes an operation compliant on its own. Transport Malta also has a live consultation open on tracking in Y-plate vehicles, and we are not going to tell you how it will land. Tell us which figures your own process asks for and we will show you the report that holds them.
The live position of the car on a map, on a page carrying your brand name, your square logo and one colour of yours, plus the contact details you set. That is the whole of it. They do not see the driver, any other car, yesterday's trips or your alerts, and the page shows no arrival estimate, so tell your customer to watch the car rather than promise them a time. Every account gets three active links free. Past three, sharing links go into the quote with the rest of the account, so tell us roughly how many bookings a week you would send one for and we will price it in.
No, and it would be an expensive thing to find out after signing. Yipii holds no booking, no customer record and no fare. There is no meter integration, no route planning engine and no per-job costing here. What it does is show you where every car is right now, name the driver in it, keep the trail and the score behind that, and turn the whole lot into reports. Operators run it alongside whatever takes their bookings, and the desk keeps one screen open for each.
Two of the cross-industry jobs come up on nearly every taxi fleet we fit: Driver ID & auto-assignment and Vehicle access control & immobilisation.