Fleetster corporate car sharing reduces costs at Dutch utility

Cogas’ Dutch vehicle fleet has seen a mid-term cost-reduction potential of more than 25%, following the introduction of a car sharing scheme.

Cogas introduced the corporate car sharing solution fleetster in August 2013 in order to manage a pool of nine cars.

“We were facing the decision of either acquiring new cars or optimising the utilisation of the existing fleet“, said Bert Liezen of Cogas. The company from the Dutch region of Overijssel runs an electric, a hybrid, six natural gas and a diesel car on its pool fleet. The specific costs and driving ranges varied significantly for the various car types.

Since August 2013, all journeys have been booked in advance with Fleetster. Before the introduction of Fleetster, the utilisation of the company’s electric car was the biggest issue. Users had to deal themselves with issues such as charging behaviour, charging duration, and real driving ranges.

As a result the electric car was rarely booked, even though it has the lowest operating costs. The Fleetster managed to increase its utilisation considerably. It contains a proprietary database with fleet relevant information about all available vehicles.

Each time a user wants to book an electric car, fleetster accesses this data to look up whether the vehicle will have enough electricity left for an additional journey.

The electric car is now used for 9% of all journeys, and based on an utilisation analysis Fleetster has calculated that a total of 36% of all journeys could be electric.