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Insight Part 2: Whilst I’m in the mood to expose some of the trade secrets that lay behind contract hire rates let me delve a little deeper into the area of vehicle pricing and depreciation. Fleet News recently reported some incredible increases in new car costs, mainly as a result of the exchange rate against the Euro. Since January 2008, according to Read more »

If you are a regular reader of my postings you know that I rage on about simply taking the cheapest lease rate. In a recent article in Fleet News I found that I wasn’t the only one holding these views, most of the leasing companies do also. In fact it seems that the reason why many large lessors have pulled out of the broker market is that they don’t Read more »

In 2008 there were 14 million sat navs in use in the UK, by now it is assumed that over half of all cars on the UK roads (30 million) now has a driver with a sat nav. According to psychologist Dr Victoria Bourne, writing in Fleet News, research shows that up to 78% of accidents are caused by distractions. The question is – are sat navs more distracting than a mobile phone? A secondary question is – are sat navs less distracting than a paper map? The reason why the safety experts and police are Read more »

I’ve often pointed out to customers that they can now have their new cars serviced at non franchised dealers and still retain their warranty cover. This resulted from the changes that were made to the EU Block Exemption rules removing the stranglehold that manufacturers had over the servicing of new vehicles during the warranty period, that was cunningly extended by most manufacturers to 3 years. In an effort to Read more »

We are all being forced to consider greener cars and the manufacturers have to be seen to be actively developing more environmentally friendly engines or face some hefty fines. So you may be forgiven for thinking that the cars being marketed as ‘green cars’ are much more fuel efficient than standard cars. Well according to latest research the differences can be minimal. For example the Skoda Octavia Greenline is Read more »

The recent major recall by Toyota, as a result of their brake and accelerator problems, has given rise to some knee jerk reactions amongst drivers when they now receive recall notices. As I recently pointed out, recalls are fairly common but not all faults that are in need of attention are life threatening so there is no need to stop using the car and start taking the bus to work the moment a recall notice arrives in Read more »

It would seem that companies are more environmentally aware than private motorists. According to statistics issued last year, as part of Fleet News Intelligence Report, and more recently backed up by information from the British Vehicle Rental and Leasing Association (BVRLA), average CO2 emissions from cars put onto fleet leases dropped from 149.9g/km to 144 g/km following a drop of 9 percentage Read more »

If you have no children to educate, no elderly relatives in need of care, you are employed in something that pays more than minimum wages it may be that your biggest priority in life is your car and what it costs you to run. If that’s the case you may be interested in some information kindly provided by Fleet News. They have looked at some of the major transport proposals and initiatives  and compared the Read more »

Small businesses are finding it more difficult to finance vehicles using their traditional and most popular methods of finance, HP, business loans and overdraft. It seems that more are now turning to leasing, according to Fleet News, as it is easier to arrange the finance, reduces the risk and spreads the funding around. Last year, according to the Finance and Leasing Association (FLA), financing new and used cars to Read more »