We use cookies to ensure that we give you the best experience on our website. If you continue without changing your settings, we will assume that you are happy to receive all cookies on the Business Car website. However, if you would like to, you can change your cookies at any time
The start point for the best source of fleet information |
In among all the Government bail-out requests from cash-strapped global carmakers, GM/Opel's idea to resurrect scrappage incentives on old cars and interest-free credit to buy new ones sounds at first glance like an immediate-term winner.
The arguments were most recently put forward by Opel to the German Chancellor, but it turns out similar ideas have also been outlined in a series of letters to the UK chancellor Alistair Darling by our very own Society of Motor Manufacturers and Traders, too.
The logic is simple: give people a financial incentive to trade-in their old polluter and link the interest-free credit only to new cars meeting a certain emission and fuel efficiency threshold. It could transform the UK car parc very quickly, or as one carmaker PR put it: "Get all the old crap off the road."
The Government would be seen to be doing its part in getting the economy going again as well as driving UK transport to greener pastures, while consumers - both business and retail - should benefit from lower cost, higher efficiency products.
An SMMT spokesman described the scrappage deal as "part of a package to kick-start the market", but the detail of how it would work is thin on the ground. At this stage the SMMT is not recommending a specific incentive amount or suggesting how old the vehicle would need to be to qualify. The UK has no experience of running such schemes on a nationwide scale either, unlike several other European countries from France to Italy that have initiated them in the past. There have only been short-term specific carmaker-led scrappage incentive initiatives in Britain.
In terms of UK fleets - mainly running newer and more fuel-efficient vehicles - the financial carrot would have to be pretty big to make sense, but if it incentivised them to move to sub-160g/km vehicles more quickly say, the benefits could be significant to the Government's support of the EU's overall environmental aim to get to a 130g/km fleet average by 2012.
In terms of real eco fleet benefit, maybe one area to look at first would be older light commercial vehicles rather than cars due to their often-older technology, longer life and more polluting nature.
The SMMT also acknowledged the need to avoid too short-term a scheme that might create too high a spike in sales and thus damage residual values and market stability. But one way or another, action needs to be taken that offers something more intelligent than merely throwing money at carmakers to help them make more of the same vehicles most consumers now no longer want or can afford to run.
BusinessCar magazine ©2019
Business Car Magazine © 2020 | Business Car is part of NS Media Group.
