Tuesday

To Paris to drive the new Renault Scenic and Megane Sports Tourer. The Scenic is a much better car than the current one, and will be around £2,000 cheaper too, with prices starting at £13,595 (or £14,995 for the longer Grand Scenic with two extra seats). The interior is dramatically improved, except for the incorporated TomTom satellite navigation screen which suffers from windscreen reflection. 

The Megane Sports Tourer has to be the prettiest estate in its class. The hatchback has been accused of looking dull, but the load-lugger has some great lines, and at £950 more than the five-door, is worth every penny. It goes on sale in August.
Keith Hawes, Renault’s fleet and LCV director, told me that it will not do any rental business at all this year, and that new car stock in the UK is at an all-time low.

 

Wednesday

To Suzuki’s headquarters in Milton Keynes. It has benefited hugely from the scrappage scheme, selling more than 3,400 cars, but thinks it will have enough cars to meet demand. 

The Swift and Splash superminis seem to be taking the majority of sales, but Suzuki has also sold a few Vitara SUVs.
Suzuki doesn’t sell many cars into fleet – around 90% go to retail customers, and this will continue after it decided to cancel its upper-medium sector challenger. 

General manager Ian Price confirmed that the model planned for Europe has been cancelled as it would not have made commercial sense, particularly as the sector is shrinking. So Suzuki will stick at what it is good at – selling small cars.

Friday

A visit to the Hertz disposal site near Manchester was like going back in time as all the cars lined up for sale were on 07 plates with 30,000-50,000 miles on the clock.

This is a sign of the times as rental companies are being forced to keep cars longer as manufacturers are reluctant to supply them with new models – a far cry from just a couple of years ago when the average age of a rental car was around six months old. 

But these older cars are causing Hertz no problems as they are in demand from the trade. It is finding that customers are buying these cars – as times get hard, cheaper cars are proving very popular.