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Mitsubishi plug-in hybrid to act as catalyst for fleet drive

Date: 18 March 2014   |   Author: Jack Carfrae

Mitsubishi is stepping up its fleet operations prior to the launch of its first plug-in hybrid model in the UK, the 44g/km Outlander PHEV, which it believes will reel in significantly more corporate sales. 

More staff in the fleet department, business specialist dealers and a huge increase in its marketing budget are all in the offing, according to managing director Lance Bradley. 

Speaking to BusinessCar, he said: "We'll recruit at least two more people to the fleet department.

"We're simply going to need more people to sell PHEVs. In a lot of ways it's a bigger change for them because we could double our fleet volume with this." 

He added there were plans to up the number of Mitsubishi dealers and fleet and business programmes ready to go: "We're looking for new dealers. We've got 108 now - that will grow to 130. 

"We are [recruiting business specialist dealers]. At our dealer conference we'll launch a local business programme and a dealer fleet programme.

"We're going to focus more on the small business market. This is something most manufacturers are not very good at.

"We haven't been very good at it, but we're focussing on it quite a lot. It's the area where we're probably weakest. 

"Companies that run one or two vehicles, they don't think of themselves as fleets, they think of themselves as architects or whatever, because they are.

"The management of the vehicles falls to 'Fred' because he's got time to do it - he's not a fleet manager, that's not how he thinks or how he plans."

Bradley said he also intended to drum up the company's larger fleet business, typically public sector organisations such as the Highways Agency and Environment Agency. 

"We have relationships with a lot of Government-funded bodies and they have green targets within them, so we're kind of pushing against an open door there.

"They're often fairly high-visibility customers, as in the cars tend to be quite visible to the public."

He added that the marketing budget would be ratcheted up in-line with an anticipated increase in overall sales. "We'll do around 15,000 units at the end of this year. In the coming fiscal year, it's going to be more than 20,000 units.

"We'll go to over 30,000 units within five; that could easily be within three." 

A suite of other plug-in hybrid models are set to follow and Bradley said it would have a plug-in version of every model "within five years".



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