Vehicles: What should be in your acquisition policy?

Patrick McGillycuddy, Skoda head of fleet, looks at vehicle acquisition for small fleets.

While it may not feel like it, a car’s CO2 emissions figure isn’t just a tool for the Government to financially clobber both fleet drivers and the companies that run those fleets - a CO2 figure is also a useful measure for businesses themselves to adopt in order to lower whole life costs.

The importance of aiming for the lowest CO2 cars in terms of company fleet taxation and helping the environment is of a major concern across the industry, and these certainly are worthy points.

However, there are many more advantages to selecting a low-CO2 car.

The main reason is that CO2 is directly linked to the amount of fuel consumed by the engine. In other words, the lower your fleet’s CO2 figure, the lower your fuel bill will be.

What’s more, CO2 figures also make an impact on residual values. So, again, the lower the figure the more popular your vehicles are going to be at the end of their term on the fleet.

It’s the same with vehicle reliability; fleets need to think just that further step on.

So, reliability is not only important so that your drivers aren’t left stranded at the side of the road, but any vehicle downtime is going to impact on overall business efficiency.

Even if a replacement car is part of a deal, this still adds to admin levels and reduces efficiency. It’s best to have a car that’s reliable in the first place.

Amazingly, a recent respected survey has shown that some fleets, particularly the smaller ones, still aren’t including either reliability or CO2 as part of their vehicle acquisition policy.

Smaller fleet suffer in this respect because they are less likely to have a dedicated person handling business vehicles.

After all, if you’re running, say, 20 cars then it may not be worth all of one person’s time to run them.

Equally, if something does go wrong – for instance a vehicle breakdown – then it will take up more time from this scarce resource, so it’s vital to get things right in the first place.

This is why it’s vitally important to find suppliers willing to work with your business – companies who understand that fleets, and not just small fleets, need help.