FleetCheck offers new vehicle replacement planner

New vehicle replacement planner technology is being introduced by FleetCheck to help Covid-affected fleets calculate when cars and vans should be replaced.

The planner incorporates factors affecting replacement such as vehicle mileage, age, total maintenance costs and the finance terms under which it is funded.

FleetCheck said settings can be created by the user and customised to suit their existing vehicle replacement policy, or benchmark profiles created by FleetCheck can be adopted.

Peter Golding, managing director at FleetCheck, said: “Since March of last year, most fleets have found themselves for extended periods either operating in the frontline of the crisis and racking up mileage at a higher rate than usual, or parked at home waiting until physical meetings were possible again.

“This has made a nonsense of the kind of conventional, static replacement cycles under which most fleets have been operating for decades, shortening, or increasing the potential fleet life of vehicles to a quite substantial degree.

“All of this is being complicated by the current shortage of new cars and vans, which is seeing vehicle order times sometimes stretching 12 months into the future. This is very much a live issue for a large part of our user base.

“Many of our customers have been asking for assistance in this area and so we have been working on the new Vehicle Replacement Planner in recent months, which we believe provides a comprehensive answer to this problem.”

Lockdown measures employed during the coronavirus crisis have resulted in thousands of fleet managers running vehicles from their homes.

Last month, fleets were urged to hold fire on making wholesale changes to company car replacement cycles, with the full impact of Covid-19 not yet clear.

Golding said the planner can be used to help fleets to identify a suitable standard replacement cycle for use across their fleet, or for different vehicle types they operate.

It can also be used where there is no standard replacement policy, showing when a vehicle is likely to need replacing based on set parameters and usage pattern over time, Golding added.

The vehicle replacement planner is being added to FleetCheck’s Expert and Professional levels of fleet management software for free, it said.