I've been wondering about how fleets are costed out (fascinating, I know).
Do firms genuinely find it cheapest to run cars for 3 years, having bought / leased them at a knock down rate and sidestepping maintenance issues, or do they account for the impression the vehicles make? Obviously for company cars there's also an element of remuneration for the driver, so he'll want the biggest / best car he can have, but I've noticed that most major firms will tend to run fairly new commercial vehicles too... Or is downtime so expensive that comprimises on reliability cannot be made?
Every fleet car that I've had the "pleasure" of using has been run on the absolutely minimum tariff. When it comes to things that matter like tyres, the companies have specified dreadful cheap teflon s**te and have insisted that every tyre must be run to the legal minimum before being replaced. Servicing occurs only to the maintenance schedule, even when I had to drive halfway across Europe on company business and a service fell due during the trip I wasn't permitted to get the car serviced before setting out. Bloody stupid.
Mind you the fleet manager was a complete and utter fecking k*****ad.
Lots do account for the impression - both ways. The majority of cars in the carparks I visit now have Audi or BMW badges on, a couple of Jaguars and the odd "something else." A few companies have lots of Ford and Vauxhall badges, as to have something German might be considered that they're too expensive or successful. Or something.
It depends - lease companies are especially anal about things. Owned fleet managers are - should be! - more flexible. The fleet manager I worked for had a simple policy of buying something at the one year point and selling it on at the four year point. We'd try mix and match vehicles every year to try to keep the mileage at the end of the period, within reason: sometimes this didn't work. At the time we were buying steep depreciating fleet car favourites - 406, Mondeo, Laguna, Vectra, Carina E - and had a manual diesel only policy, for the consultants at least. Directors had a wider choice - essentially they told Alan what they wanted; most had Saabs with "Aero" on the rump. Some consultants needed an automatic (and finding a diesel automatic was at the time difficult outside of Mercedes and Citroen).
We'd also keep a couple of cars as pool cars or mules as we called them.
Actually... yeah the CO2 laws were being introduced so we were trying a few leased machines. Lease companies can be especially short sighted about some things. For tyres, lease companies insist that they're replaced at the
1.6mm point. For our fleet, I'd put the car on the replacement list when the tread depth reached 3mm, we'd get a discount if we replaced lots at once, so we'd try to have four or five cars getting new tyres at any one time. Muggins here used to check bulbs, tyres and fluids, it was easy to extrapolate when we'd have a bunch of tyres at the 2.5 to 3.5mm point so we'd have an en-mass change (my record was to have twenty three tyres replaced at once).
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