GreenFleet

Well here we are, 2009 is here and we are starting to recover from Christmas, we have all eaten far too much turkey, attended too many parties, eaten and drinking to excess and now we face the New Year with no money and the credit crunch still looming over our shoulders.
    
Now, many of us consider that the credit crunch is bad news and of course for many people it is. However, for environmentalists it makes companies operating fleet vehicles even more conscious about reducing fleet costs and the best way to reduce fleet costs is to reduce the fuel used – reduced fuel means reduced carbon.
    
During December the fleet market went to sleep and stopped making decisions or investing, it was easy to blame the holiday season for doing nothing but now it’s the New Year and a fresh start.

Grey fleet
Now is the time to start making decisions that will save your company money and reduce the emissions from your fleet vehicles. It’s time to look at all aspects of your fleet – the obvious areas are your cars, vans and HGVs. These are a good start but the real work begins when you start to work on your grey fleet, your business and private mileage splits, the mileage and CO2 performance.
    
This second batch is far more challenging and will require an investment in time and effort but the rewards can be very substantial. Grey fleet represents a major unmanaged overhead for many fleets and a substantial issue from a duty of care point of view.  
    
It’s amazing how many fleets cannot manage their business and private mileage splits; when it comes to mileage companies are being robbed blind by many employees padding mileage expenses claims. Sorry to sound harsh by this, fiddling can be as little as just rounding up through to one of my cases a 30 per cent increase in actual mileages! This means that eradicating this issue could save huge amounts of money
for your company and it’s surprisingly easy to do.
    
From the vehicle manufacturer point of view it is good news, they are working hard to reduce their overall emissions, you would expect this from the main stream but those companies not traditionally fleet based are making huge strides as well. I recently had a meeting with Fiat UK that amazed me, not only are there cars low emission and in many cases great cars but they have a system fitted that allows the driver/company to download and analyse their driving data and be advised how to improve their MPG and CO2 performance. So how much does this system cost? Well, it’s a feature of the car that is included in the price of the car, so this is innovation indeed.
    
Most of the fleet manufacturers from BMW and Mercedes through to Renault, Ford etc have all got significant low carbon programmes in place and due to this the average CO2 performance of UK fleet is dropping at a huge rate.

Money matters
The only major issue facing the big manufacturers is lack for money, we all know the difficulties being faced by both GM and Ford, and will the US backing of these major companies give any support to the European subsidiaries? Who knows but you can guarantee that they will look after the US arm first!
    
Here in the fleet sector I am in the middle of a major Client Environmental Fleet Review (CEFR) for a major public sector fleet and their average CO2 for company cars is now below 140g/km, a staggering performance for any fleet and a clear example of what can be achieved. Why is it that I am not being asked by the vast majority of fleets to duplicate this type of policy for them, why is it that many fleet operators are still sitting on the fence doing nothing?
    
I suspect the answer is that many fleet operators know they should do something, but just don’t know what to do and how to change policy and strategy to bring about the results they desire. Well, to these managers I’d like to say you are not alone, you are the majority but you can do something about it, you can take advantage of the CEFR process from the many expert consultants in the UK and get your carbon footprint reduced, improve your fleet costs and tighten up your compliance with regulations and duty of care.
    
So this is your new year’s resolution list:
1.Establish what your carbon footprint and your annual fuel use really are
2.Devise an action plan to reduce your carbon, MPG and overheads
3.Explore what technology you could apply to your fleet

• Hybrids (retro fit and factory)
• Electric vehicles (extend life and use WLC to judge use)
• Gaseous vehicles (LPG is still viable for the right fleet)
• Telematics – they are down in price and provide more data than ever
• Mileage capture software and tools – grey fleet and cash takers!
  

Take action
Finally, yes we are in the middle of a credit crunch but please do not be like the many hundreds of sheep in the UK and let yourself fall into inaction and lethargy, sitting there doing nothing because of the state of the country.
    
Now is the time to be positive, to take action and find every way you can to streamline your fleet, to reduce overheads, reduce carbon and reduce mileage and fuel use. If necessary, invest in methods, tools and technology that will provide a substantiated return on investment. This is important, you must make sure that when you do invest your investment will provide your business with a good return, do not be conned into investing in that promises the earth and delivers nothing.
    
So good luck for the future – Happy New Year!

For more information
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