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Petrol vs diesel: the great fleet debate
The shift from diesel-dominant fleets back towards petrol has been a hot topic for some time. Some parties maintain that the current pattern won't change, while others suggest that the lower cost of unleaded fuel and a cheaper P11D price now make the new breed of efficient petrol engines more viable.
KeeResources' Mark Jowsey commented: "I had a car with a small, efficient petrol engine recently and I achieved an mpg average that I thought made this engine viable over three years and 60,000 miles. This product, in my mind, seemed a more viable product than it would have been five years ago. I think we will see less dominance of diesel in the company car market."
Rupert Pontin of Glass's added: "I was asked this question five, 10 and 15 years ago and we still haven't seen any great volume [of petrols]. Are we going to see that is a very good question.
"What we are seeing is an increase in salary sacrifice and that puts a very different spin on it. It's taking people out of what companies say, which is 'you do this job, you drive an Astra diesel'. Salary sacrifice allows them to say 'you know what, I fancy a small petrol'."
But Arval's Mike Waters cautioned: "The issue there is that reallocating a car can be an issue if the employee leaves and you've got a driver doing a higher mileage."
Pontin continued to say that the increasing number of small, efficient petrol engines haven't made the impact that they were slated to: "There has been this influx of petrols that are supposed to be more efficient and reliable, but they're not. That doesn't help it and it doesn't make people want to shift towards it - it might look good on paper, but the reality is that it's not."
The discussion turned to the subject of manufacturers' fuel economy claims and how difficult it is to meet them. Pontin continued: "My car is supposed to do 57.5mpg on paper. I cannot get it to do more than 42mpg even when I'm trying."
Jowsey added: "Some of the official figures, which are correctly achieved in a test environment, cannot be met."
BusinessCar editor Paul Barker asked if it was better to have "a test that we all know is flawed than no test at all", to which Waters responded: "It's better to have a test than to have no test at all, but there is no better way of looking at a fleet proposition than whole-life costs."
The EST's Caroline Watson suggested that manufacturers differed in their approach to the official fuel economy test depending on what they wanted to achieve. "It isn't a level playing field and some are optimising it for the test, while others are doing it so it's more realistic and the customer is satisfied," she said.
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