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Damian James' Blog: 25 September 2009 - Manual intervention
Date: 28 September 2009
I had a moan a couple of weeks ago about vehicle return conditions and charges at the end of leases. As I stated then I have seen an increase in the creativity and the charges at lease end.
I have had another batch of vehicles inspected recently and one of the things that got picked up was a lack of driver manuals in one vehicle.
For this oversight we were going to be charged £30.
Let's just put this in perspective. I'm talking about a five year old commercial vehicle. It's been used on a daily basis as a tool for carrying around equipment essential to someone's job.
In other words it has had a normal working commercial vehicle life.
We all know that when this vehicle goes to auction a potential buyer is not going to look in the glove box to see if the vehicle has its owner's manual. If for some incredible reason they do notice that the vehicle has no manuals, is this going to make any difference to their potential bids? If by some unimaginable reason it does are they going to lower their bid by £30.00?
I think not.
Luckily in this situation we have managed to avoid the charge as we have located a spare manual so we can quite legitimately cross that charge off our list but to me it underlines the change in behaviour by some organisations during 2009.
Needless to say, I changed our leasing arrangements some time ago to make sure these types of situations don't occur with vehicles I now procure but I still have a number of inherited vehicles on older type leases that are yet to be returned.
I shall certainly be checking their glove boxes more thoroughly in the future.
I will also keep you updated on any of the more interesting reasons for extracting additional money from customers.
