ZeroLanes, by Black Zero

One engine. Several transport businesses.

We built a pricing, dispatch and compliance engine, and then built a transport company on top of it. The engine is the asset. ZeroLanes UK is the first thing running on it, and it is live today.

How the engine works
Book a journey
Live ZeroLanes UKNext TruckingThen Whitelabelling
Fixed pricingGuarded auctionCompliance gateTrust tiersOne engine
The engine

Four rules, enforced in software

Not policies anyone has to remember, and not settings a busy night can override. These are the constraints every job passes through, whichever business it belongs to.

The price is fixed before anything moves

The customer sees one number, set before they commit. Traffic, a diverted route or a slower day do not change it, because it was never a function of time spent. What the journey costs us to run is a separate question with no route back to that number.

Work is awarded on a score, inside a band

Transport companies bid within a floor and a ceiling we set, and the winner is chosen on punctuality, acceptance rate, proximity and trust tier alongside price. Cheapest alone does not win, which is the failure this whole design exists to avoid.

There is a floor no bid can go under

Every job carries a minimum. A bid below it cannot be accepted at all, so the work cannot be won by undercutting the people doing it. That floor is what makes the job worth doing properly, and it is enforced rather than encouraged.

Compliance is a gate, not a reminder

Licence, hire-and-reward insurance, MOT and DBS are stored with the date each one runs out. When that date passes, the driver or the vehicle stops being offered work automatically. Nobody has to notice, and nobody can decide to let it run a week longer.

Build it once. Run it several times.

What runs on it

The same engine, three applications

A transport business is mostly the same problem wearing different clothes: quote it, award it to somebody who can actually do it, prove they were allowed to, and pay them. Change the cargo and the licensing regime and the engine still holds.

Live today

ZeroLanes UK

Passengers, in the UK, under private hire rules. Airport transfers, business travel and point-to-point journeys, quoted at a fixed price before booking and dispatched through the guarded auction like everything else.

  • Open in Greater Manchester, one region at a time
  • Every driver licence, insurance policy, MOT and DBS verified before dispatch
How it works
Not built yet

ZeroLanes Trucking

Freight, in the US, under a different licensing regime entirely. Built as its own company on the same engine rather than bolted onto the cab product, because a lorry is not a large car and pretending otherwise is how the compliance model breaks.

  • The pricing, award and compliance rules carry over
  • The licensing, equipment and customer do not. The name is not settled
What carries over
Not built yet

Whitelabelling

The engine itself, run by a transport company under its own name, for customers it already has. This is the one that is not a branch of the group: it is the asset sold as a product, which is only credible once we have run a real business on it ourselves. That is the order it is sequenced in, and why it comes last.

  • Their brand, their customers, their developer accounts
  • No commercial terms are set, and the open questions are listed rather than hidden
What is still open

What the engine guarantees

Three numbers that hold on every job, in every business running on it. None of them is a volume, because volume is not what we are claiming.

1Price, agreed before the work starts
4Documents checked before dispatch
0Bids accepted below the floor
Where we run

One region at a time

We open one region at a time rather than the whole country at once, so that every area has verified drivers and cars behind it before journeys are taken there. The first is Greater Manchester.

Why it is built this way

The job is sold under our name, so the job stays our responsibility.

That is the difference between this and a broker passing work along. A customer books ZeroLanes and deals with ZeroLanes. Which company drives the car is ours to arrange, and ours to answer for.

Need a car today?

The UK service is live. Fixed price, quoted before you book, no account needed.

Book at zerolanes.co.uk