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The Insider is finding that everyone has a different concept of what it means to make the fleet green
A fleet manager can't just wake up one morning and decide 'to go green'. It's way more complicated than that. I'm being subjected to a constant, low-level needling by the corporate responsibility people to present them with examples of greenness in our fleet, but as I keep telling them: I can't just turn 'their' shade of green. The are other hues to consider.
The way I see it there are three ways to 'go green' in terms of transport. The first is to do it publicly, or the marketing man's way. This involves buying vehicles that make the most obvious eco-statements: the Toyota Prius, the G-wiz electric car, an electric van, etc. You get the idea. Green-ness well and truly trumpeted.
The second is go Government green. It's less flashy but satisfies the official line that you're trying by buying cars with under 120g/km of CO2. The car companies are playing ball on this, so there's now a good choice of family hatches that qualify for the light-green tax-band B. Decent fleet stuff that won't rile my drivers.
The final one is to stick to the current diet of diesels, but extract green-ness from the drivers and cars themselves. This is where it gets messy in a tortuous, mostly unquantifiable, un-PR friendly way, yet it's also most likely to yield results. A thrashed Prius is no more green than a sensitively driven (or heavily monitored) Porsche Boxster, but give me a bog-standard Mercedes A-class and I'll turn it into the future of motoring. How? Beat my drivers with carrots, that's how.
“But green has got to sit closer to black than red on the fiscal colour chart and with that in mind, I'm seriously considering option number two: green by Government decree.” |
The Insider |
But green has got to sit closer to black than red on the fiscal colour chart and with that in mind, I'm seriously considering option number two: green by Government decree. Restrict a large number of my drivers to cars emitting 120g/km or less and the £35 a pop bill equates to £100 a year less each on road-fund tax, even if the company car tax and (I suspect) the fuel bill doesn't budge. Unlike the hybrids, these new fuel-sipping diesels don't cost a huge amount more to buy, either.
I don't think there'd be a huge backlash. The qualifying cars are getting sexier - I'm hearing talk of a sub-120g/km Volvo C30, Audi A3, VW Golf and Peugeot 308, and they join the green versions of the BMW 1-series, Mini Cooper, Renault Megane and Citroen C4 already on sale. In other words, a good mix of the desireable and decently dull
To top it all, the CR team will be positively purring. Shift all the senior drivers who'd sooner crawl than drive an 'Efficiency' model onto another scheme altogether and the CR press release could truthfully exclaim that 'no new company car emits more than 120g/km'.
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