Vehicle Capabilities
What each vehicle can do — seats, luggage, payload, towing, grade and fittings — and how a job gets matched to a car that can actually run it.
Everything you can say about a vehicle, and everything a job can ask for. This is what the allocation board decides on, so it is worth ten minutes once.
Find it at Commercial → Vehicle capabilities.
Three kinds of answer
A capability is not just a label — the kind decides how a job gets matched to it, and the three behave differently on purpose.
| Kind | Example | How a job matches it |
|---|---|---|
| A number, or a measurement | Seats, large bags, payload, towing capacity | More satisfies less. A job for four is happy with a six-seater |
| A grade | Standard, Comfort, Business, Luxury | Higher satisfies lower. Somebody who booked Comfort is happy with a Lux car |
| A fitting | Wheelchair ramp, tail lift, tipper, tow hitch | Exactly, and never by substitution |
A fitting is never answered by a different fitting
A tail lift is for load. A wheelchair ramp is for a person. A low floor solves a different problem again, and often the better one. None of them stands in for another, so a job that needs a ramp will never be offered a van that has a tail lift — however new, large or expensive that van is.
They apply to the kinds of asset you choose
Each capability names the asset categories it belongs to — Vehicle, Marine, Person, Equipment, Other. A groundworks firm is never asked how many hand bags a dumper takes, and a taxi firm never sees "hooklift".
What ships, and changing it
Five grades and a set of fittings ship with the product. You only have a row here for what you have changed — rename one, rescope it, switch off what you never sell, or add your own.
- Clearing a name puts ours back. That is how you undo a rename.
- Switching one off stops it being offered. It does not touch the vehicles and jobs already using it, which keep it and still read as themselves.
- The grade ladder is an order, not a set of numbers. Move a grade up and you change what a price list scoped to it matches, so it is arranged rather than numbered.
- How a capability is matched cannot be changed on the ones we ship. Turning "Wheelchair ramp" into a grade would make a ramp something a better car could satisfy, which is somebody left on a pavement.
Setting them on a vehicle
On the asset's Edit screen, under What this vehicle can do.
Blank means inherit, not none. Leave the seats blank and the vehicle uses its type's answer, so "8 seats" set once on your 8-Seater type covers all forty of them. Set a value on one vehicle and only that one changes — the van with the ramp, the car that came back from the bodyshop with two seats out.
The box shows what it would inherit — 8 — from the vehicle type — so you can
always see which number the board is using and where it came from. The asset
list shows the same thing: inherited values are greyed, values set on that
vehicle are solid.
Where nothing has been set anywhere and the VIN has been decoded, the decode answers — a 5-seat car becomes a 4-seater to book, because the driver is in one of them. Luggage never comes from the VIN: a decoder reports boot litres and you count bags, and converting one into the other would be inventing a number rather than measuring it.
Asking for one on a job
On the phone-order console, beside the passenger and luggage counts. Only fittings can be required — seats are a party size and already have the pax count, and a grade is an upsell rather than a requirement.
The allocation list then says what each vehicle cannot do, in words:
- "No wheelchair ramp" — that car cannot run this job. It is dimmed, not hidden, because you may know something the record does not.
- "nobody has said about wheelchair ramp" — nobody has recorded it either way. A question, not a refusal.
Unknown is never a no
A vehicle nobody has configured is not a vehicle that fails — it is one nobody has answered for. Capacities that have not been filled in show as unknown so the car still appears; the one exception is a fitting, which fails when unknown, because sending a car that turns out not to have a ramp leaves somebody standing on a pavement.
Related
- Assets — where you set these on a vehicle
- Trips & Dispatch — the allocation board that uses them