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It's a pity that no-one has worked out how to harness the centrifugal forces in political spin. If they had, last weekend's oil summit in Jeddah might actually have brought some....
It's a pity that no-one has worked out how to harness the centrifugal forces in political spin. If they had, last weekend's oil summit in Jeddah might actually have brought some relief to hard-pressed fleets.
Gordon Brown's media minders were on overdrive after the meeting, spinning the tale that the PM had secured a deal for an extra 500,000 daily barrels of black gold from the Saudis. A return to cheaper petrol, we were invited to infer, was only just around the corner.
Half a million barrels a day, though, is just a drop in the bucket to a world that gets through 600 million barrels of oil a week. The market was unimpressed. The oil price actually went up on Monday.
It's not even certain the promised oil is truly "new". The dealings of Saudi Arabia's state-owned oil business are so opaque that no-one outside OPEC can be sure Mr Brown's handout wasn't one of several production increases that were announced some time ago and later postponed.
In that sense the British Government's spin machine, which loves to repeatedly serve up old policies and spending announcements as "new initiatives", was given a taste of its own medicine this weekend. But as pleasing as this is to witness, it won't blunt the impact of soaring energy costs.
Fleet decision makers of an enquiring disposition may like to know what the Prime Minister actually said at the summit as opposed to pinning their hopes on unsubstantiated claims about a production deal.
In a nutshell, he offered the oil exporting countries a big stake in the UK's energy future in return for a slice of the staggering tide of oil money pouring daily into their sovereign wealth funds. How much? Well, he told the summit that meeting the UK's renewable energy target alone will cost this country £100 billion over the next 10 years.
What does that say about long term fuel prices? When Middle East oil exporters begin to entertain talk of diversification into wind turbines, electric cars and nuclear generators in places like the UK, the omens are not good for a renewed gush of cheap oil. No-one close to the game is surely expecting oil to return to the days of $40, or perhaps even $100, a barrel.
But according to a question Alphabet asked for BusinessCar during our recent Green Fleet Research Project, a fifth of fleets do not have any contingency plans in place if petrol hits £2 a litre. A rise on that scale - which is not out of the question if Jeddah is anything to go by - would add around 12p to the cost of every business mile, just for fuel, compared to running costs in early 2007.
The fear behind the Government's spin is real: businesses could find themselves facing dramatically higher fuel costs sooner rather than later. That means today's decisions about vehicle acquisition policy will quickly start affecting profitability.
Fuel consumption not only has an increasing effect on running costs as oil prices rise, it also drives the level of CO2 taxes (including employer's NI on company car BIK and, from next year, capital allowances) and is becoming more important at resale. Sellers and buyers have already started to build these factors into vehicle values. Companies that buy primarily on discount could easily find apparent bargains turning into fuel-hungry, heavily-taxed white elephants with plummeting residual values.
One thing all fleets need to do, if they don't already, is to avoid such a pitfall by planning their acquisition policy around carefully-worked-out whole life costs. Whole life costs make for sound financial risk management. And - fuel and CO2 being two sides of the same coin - they make good green sense, too.
A lot more sense than the spin the Government is putting out to try to obscure the hard economic realities that lie behind the need for, among other things, very carefully-planned fleet policies in coming years.
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