Leasedrive Velo Blog

Roddy Graham, Commercial Director

Given we are now two months into the new decade, I wonder how organisations connected with fleet management are rising to today’s fleet challenges? And, there are quite a few, just ask Toyota!

With talk now of a double-dip recession as the EuroZone totters on the brink of financial uncertainty in the PIGS states, allied to growing unrest among private as well as public sector workers, we could be heading for the biggest civil unrest, certainly on Continental Europe, since 1968.

This week has witnessed large protests in Spain, a general strike in Greece, industrial action at French airports and oil depots, announcement of a sudden two-week production halt at all Fiat plants in Italy and impending BA strike action. The only counter-balance was the cancellation of a strike by Lufthansa pilots.

However, with the Governor of the Bank of England voicing concern over a stalled European economy, prospects for UK plc certainly look worse than they did at the turn of the new decade.

Weighing up the fleet news over the first two months, there is however a greater deal of optimism within our own business sector. Let us hope it does not prove a false dawn.

Whatever the eventual outcome – a slow acceleration out of the recent recession or a gentle slide into the second part of a double-dip recession, the focus within the fleet industry should remain sharply directed at delivering value from the fleet and anticipating the upturn, either this year or next.

Central to achieving both objectives is ensuring proper risk management and that employees have the right skill sets.

In this regard, sight should not be lost of the essential role our very own Institute of Car Fleet Management has to play in this delivery. Biased I may be, as chairman of the not-for-profit organisation, but it remains a fact that the ICFM is the only organisation delivering accredited fleet education and training programmes. Without doubt, the resultant qualifications see employees making a real difference within their organisations.

Organisations don’t work without people and the most successful organisations employ some of the best people, across the board. So the lesson is clear, without properly qualified people, our sector will not make the most of the opportunities that lie ahead.

And, despite the doom and gloom in certain quarters, make no mistake there are, and will be, huge opportunities for growth. Just make sure your people are properly trained to take advantage by maximising the opportunity.

Roddy Graham, Commercial Director

What requires a driver’s reaction time of seconds and yet a council’s reaction time of weeks? Yes, you’ve guessed it – a pothole!

Those black holes I wrote about on January 14 are indeed getting a whole lot bigger and, worst still, a whole lot more numerous. At the rate that councils are trying to catch up on repair work, all our cars will be in the knacker’s yard.

Recalls may be grabbing all the headlines at the moment but it won’t be long at this rate before the vehicles filling service bays up and down the country will be those in for suspension, tyre and wheel damage.

Even more frightening is the thought that a damaged tyre subsequently explodes on a busy motorway causing potential death or destruction, or the broken suspension on a vehicle sends it careering uncontrollably into a busy bus queue.

It is estimated that UK roads have deteriorated by 50 per cent with an accompanying dramatic increase in those black holes. The latest count suggests that on the 246,000 miles of our secondary roads, there are 1.6 million potholes, an increase of 700,000 in the past two years and still rising. That’s equivalent to one pothole every 120 yards. Well, I’ve got news for the statisticians. The journey to work this morning revealed more like one every 12 yards!

Already, there is an outstanding £10bn-worth of pothole repairs with us, the increasingly poorer taxpayer, faced with having to fund millions more pounds worth of road repairs. Meanwhile, local councils are lobbying the government for a £100m emergency repair fund.

Compensation claims in 2009 rose to £47m for injury and damage after a 30 per cent increase in the number of potholes. Remember though, to successfully claim, you have to first of all have reported the problem to your local council. If you can’t be bothered calling in, log on to Potholes website.

The latter site estimates that potholes cause as many as one in five mechanical failures on UK roads, costing drivers an estimated £320 million every year.

The AA is calling for two pence per litre from fuel taxes to be used to repair our potholes. Not a bad suggestion but then we all know how government likes to siphon off road tax and fuel duty to pay for things totally unconnected with motoring and our roads.

With an election coming up, it’s time we are all started lobbying hard before our roads degenerate to official third world status.

Roddy Graham, Commercial Director

Vehicle recalls are grabbing the headlines these days and not always for the right reasons. There has been a wave of media hysteria over the recall of seven Toyota models in the UK, subject of potential accelerator pedal related problems. Matters need to be put into proper context and the risk is that things will eventually spiral uncontrollably into trial by media, as with so many facets of society. The Fourth Estate has a responsibility to keep things in proper perspective as does the US Transportation Secretary who irresponsibly advised owners of recalled vehicles to stop driving their cars, later claiming he was misquoted!

Earlier this week I was asked by one media outlet for any comment I may care to make on the predicted imminent further recall of Prius models for an unrelated recall. This is what I stated: “Carefully laid down procedures are in place for vehicle manufacturers to follow in the event that they have to recall a model for any particular reason. We are confident that Toyota will follow the necessary course of action should this be required in the case of the Prius. The Japanese manufacturer is already handling a major recall campaign for several of its models in a well publicised voluntary recall involving a potential sticking accelerator pedal. What should always be borne in mind in these cases is that all vehicle manufacturers take their recall responsibilities extremely seriously and customer safety is always of paramount importance to them.”

Vehicle recalls are the subject of a code of practice recognised as the benchmark standard in Europe. All vehicle manufacturers have signed up to it and work closely with the relevant government agencies, the DVLA and VOSA, to ensure that owners of affected vehicles are contacted and followed-up.

Post recall investigations may highlight that the manufacturer might have acted more swiftly but we should not prejudge the case.

The irony in all this is that those vehicles affected are of Japanese manufacture, for decades held up as being among the most reliable cars built. The Honda recall announced this week underlines this irony.

For a US Transportation Secretary to have said what he did, sending Toyota shares plunging eight per cent is absolutely irresponsible and highlights a typical knee-jerk American reaction.

One could almost think that it is a planned conspiracy against the might of Toyota, having overtaken GM as the world’s largest vehicle producer, by an administration who are desperate to get the great American public to buy ‘great’ American cars – any small move in that direction would send Copenhagen commitments up in a cloud of smoke, or should I say CO2!

I recall in the Eighties, Porsche was prosecuted for having designed and manufactured a dangerous vehicle, in this case a Porsche 911 Turbo. Notoriously tail happy when driven at its limits it was no more dangerous than other high performance cars of the time. The reason for the prosecution? The drunken driver had been involved in a fatal accident having driven at speeds in excess of 90mph in a residential district. Enough said! It’s just like the case of microwave ovens having to carry an extra warning after a pet owner killed her cat by trying to dry it in the said item!

The fact is that from all accounts the Toyota accelerator problems develop over time, are not sudden, and have affected only a comparatively handful of cars. Let common sense prevail and, as fleet management providers, we have our part to play as ‘intermediaries’ between vehicle manufacturer and our fleet clients and their drivers. After all, collectively, we are the biggest new vehicle customers in the UK.

Roddy Graham, Commercial Director

Hot on the heels of moves to lower speed limits comes news of a campaign to lower drink-drive limits, something else I predicted in our recent white paper, ‘A vision of fleet management in 2015. Predictions on how the fleet industry could look in the future’.

Safety charity Brake has come down hard on the government for its inertia in a number of areas. While road deaths have fallen to their lowest levels for over 80 years, dipping below 3000 per annum, Brake quite rightly does not want any form of complacency to creep in and is calling for a ten-year road safety plan. Well, fat chance of that if government cannot put together a fully integrated transport policy! After all, road safety would form just one key element of this much needed, and still to be delivered, vision.

In a broadside at government at its annual meeting, Brake accused the government of living “in the stone age” on drink-drive limits. One of its trustees, a solicitor, advised that while many countries had only trace limits and checked one in every two drivers annually we only check fewer than two per cent! While this may sound horrifically low, the cold facts show that positive breath tests are falling so the message is getting across.

In the largest ever national campaign run in the UK over the Christmas and New Year period covering the period between 1 December 2009 and 1 January 2010, 183,397 drivers were breath tested in England and Wales during the four-week campaign. Nationally, 9148 drivers tested were arrested, representing five per cent of the sample. This was reflected in most of the 43 police forces up and down the country and shows a continued fall in those testing positive. However, it still means 300 drivers a day were above the limit.

Apparently, in the last five years of Christmas drink-drive campaigns there has been a year-on-year reduction in the number of collisions in which drinking was a contributory factor. Provisional figures for the latest national campaign indicate a fall in the number of injury road traffic collisions reported during the campaign period compared to the same period last year.

However, in the latest official statistics, in 2007 460 died as a result of drink-driving so that means there can indeed be no room for complacency and more needs to be done, as demanded by Brake.

In our white paper, we predicted that, “given the British Medical Council’s strong views on unhealthy alcohol consumption and its efforts to have all alcohol advertising banned across the board, this will be the trigger to bring current drink-driving limits more into line with Continental Europe.”

And that is not a new stance from me. In a BusinessCar blog dating back to 23 July 2008, I said, “One thing I would agree on is the proposal by the government’s chief medical officer’s call for a zero tolerance approach to teenage drivers involved in accidents after drinking. If the thousand deaths through accidents involving 15 to 24 year-olds mainly involve road accidents then something needs to be done, as the total number of road deaths is now below 3000 for the first time in over 80 years. Apparently, many countries already adopt a zero blood alcohol limit for young drivers and it might help towards addressing the overall binge drinking culture among the young.”

Tackling binge drinking and drink-driving has to be a top priority for any government.