Electric vehicles and car sharing to save Aylesbury council £100,000 a year

Aylesbury Vale District Council (AVDC) will save an estimated £100,000 a year after introducing a car sharing and rental programme following an in-depth analysis of its grey fleet spend and usage.

Nine low emission vehicles provided by Enterprise Rent-A-Car are now being used by staff travelling on council business.

As well as the saving, the efficiencies from making this switch will significantly reduce the authority’s carbon footprint.

By analysing the data from council business trips undertaken in employees’ own cars, Enterprise determined that 81% of those journeys were shorter than 50 miles and 71% of trips lasted for fewer than four hours.

In addition, the most common reason these employees didn’t use public transport instead was the lack of a train station near their intended destination, so an alternative to private vehicles was essential.

As a result of this analysis, the council has introduced nine Enterprise CarShare cars as a virtual pool car fleet – two of which are electric vehicles – to cover the organisation’s shorter business trips.

It has also provided employees with access to Enterprise’s online technology so they could hire vehicles on a daily basis for longer journeys.

All AVDC employees are now required to use the new rental and CarShare vehicles rather than their own cars for work journeys.

Sir Beville Stanier, AVDC’s cabinet member for environment and health, said: “It is important that the council leads from the front to demonstrate what can be done to reduce our impact on the environment.

“We are committed to finding more environmentally sustainable ways of doing business and daily business travel is part of that.

“Our new car pool scheme will help cut down emissions of CO2 and reduce costs of staff travel.

“We also now have better control over employee journeys and can monitor where vehicles are.”

Adrian Bewley, director of business rental UK & Ireland at Enterprise Rent-A-Car, added: “The council wanted to move away from the expense and hassle of mileage reimbursement but the question was how best to do this in the absence of a public transport option.”