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Business car drivers spend more than 70 days a year sitting behind the wheel. Surely there's got to be a more time-efficient way of travelling, asks Rupert Saunders
How much is it really costing you to have your company staff travelling around by car? For instance, do you calculate the cost of running your business cars on a pence-per-mile basis, or do you also take into account staff salaries and working hours? Or perhaps that should read -after you've finished reading this - wasted hours.
This was one of the topics raised at the launch of Bank of Scotland Vehicle Finance's Company Car Drivers' Report. The headline figure to come out of this year's analysis was that business car drivers spend, on average, more than 70 days a year just sitting behind the wheel of his (or her) car on company business.
While the amount of time spent in the car has gone up, the distance travelled has come down by 10%, to an average 14,000 miles a year. On a 7.5-hour working day that means the average speed of your business car is just over 26mph.
As Sean Bingham, director of new business at BoS Vehicle Finance, commented when presenting the results: "That's an inordinate amount of time spent in the car and it's costing UK business millions of pounds a year in wasted productivity."
So, what is the alternative? Relatively few companies have any policy about using public transport, let alone actually encouraging it, and the survey revealed 32% of drivers never use the train.
Any attempt to suggest public transport is generally laughed off with a few anecdotal stories about the cost of trains, or the inconvenience of parking at the station. At the presentation, Bingham quoted a fare of over £230 to get from his office in Watford to the Bank of Scotland office in Chester by train.
Well, sorry Sean: you can book that journey for £59.70 return and it will only take you two and a half hours each way. All you have to do is plan your meeting a few days in advance (which you probably do anyway) and arrange it for the afternoon, not 9.30 in the morning.
My point is this: unless business car managers start to think about the true cost of having executives sitting in traffic jams, we are going to carry on wasting money and the problem is going to get worse. Is that what you really want?
And yes, I drafted this article on the 40-minute train ride back from the press conference. Milton Keynes to London cost me £23 return and my six hours of parking was £1.50. I reckon that was money well spent.
Rupert Saunders is a specialist in automotive finance and retail
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