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GE Capital Solutions Fleet Services has suggested that we could reduce our running costs by up to 10%. They suggest that better fuel management could reduce fuel cost, extend service intervals on some cars and reduce tyre wear. Move away more gradually from traffic lights, turn the engine off in traffic jams and drop your speed to the legal limits would have some dramatic affects. Check tyre pressures Read more »

In an effort to reduce car usage, the Government and indeed all parties led by the Greens tried to encourage more people to work from home. Whilst there was a small increase at the time latest statistics show that the number of employees working from home has stalled since 2002. Just 3% of workers work from home although 7% do so at least once a week. These results were recently reported in the 2008 National Read more »

 If you use your own car for company business or you allow employees to drive their own cars for business use Active Risk Management feel they have a solution to checking if employees are totally road legal in their own cars by providing an ongoing audit service. Employees will be issued with an online permit which will confirm whether they are eligible to drive on company business. The record will show whether the Read more »

Things are looking a bit bleak in the motor trade over here but in the US they suffered a drop of 37.1% of new car sales last month over January 2008. However, whilst their sales are dramatically down to the levels of 1992 the sales have been steady for the last 4 months which has drawn the conclusion from the various experts and manufacturers across the pond that sales have bottomed out and are set to rise as we Read more »

Tyres are on the move! Increasing in cost that is. The sudden jump in the cost of crude oil last year followed by the drop in value of sterling resulted in a continued increase in the cost of the raw materials that are used to manufacture tyres. This has meant that prices increased by 20% over recent months with the industry warning that prices will rise even further during 2009. Kwik Fit Fleet say they are expecting some Read more »

If you are still one of those that likes to own a car but is worried by the loss in depreciation – if you are then don’t buy a Maybach 62 which is reported by trade valuers Parkers to have lost £128,899 during 2008. However, downsizing and demand for city cars has kept used prices of smaller cars high producing the lowest cash losses in 2008. You should therefore ditch the Maybach, Bentley or Aston and replace with one of the following: Read more »

Fraud and forgery crime increased by 16% in the 3^rd quarter of last year blamed on the credit crunch. Attention has been drawn towards brokers that arrange mortgages and finance as some of the main culprits helped along by the increasing acceptance of the Internet. As I recently reported things are getting tough for most of us involved in the finance industry and as happened in the last recession desperation Read more »

My advice when applying for finance is make sure you check your credit file and sort out any errors. If you went through a difficult patch, divorce, redundancy, death in the family etc. and things are fine now make sure that you put that information on your credit file (as explained in my book ‘An Insider Guide To Car Finance’) by entering a Notice of Correction, this also applies if you think that an error has Read more »

Three times this week I have had discussions about APR for absolutely no reason. The bottom line question to be asked about any finance arrangement is how much will it cost and can I afford it? I am completing a book listing over 40 ways to fund a car and I point out at the very beginning that APR is not important in many cases. I have compared an HP agreement with a PCP the latter of which has a higher APR but Read more »

It looks as though things are happening to make it easier and cheaper to park in our towns and cities although hopefully we won’t be following the French who have a much greater problem with parking than we do. So they are introducing intelligent parking meters linked to the parking bays. The clever French get the meters to assess whether a driver has exceeded his allotted time and if so an alert is sent to the Read more »