The car with no driver of its own

On Monday morning the keys are picked up by somebody other than the person who put them down on the desk on Friday afternoon. The second one gets in, reaches straight for the seat because it has been pushed to a different position, and before driving off notices what somebody else left behind in the car: a dried ring in the cup holder, a stranger's receipt in the door pocket, a steering wheel with a shinier patch in two places than around the rest of the rim. None of it is a fault. Together, it is a car nobody is glad to sit down in.

When a car belongs to everyone, it belongs to nobody

Handing over the keys is the moment that fixes the condition of the vehicle in place. Whoever takes them gets the car exactly as their predecessor left it — and a week later passes it on to the next person in that same state. Nobody received it clean, so nobody has anything to put back the way it was.

The change between any two handovers is small, as well. You cannot point at one of them and say that this is where it went wrong. So the condition moves in one direction: not quickly, but without interruption, because nowhere in that queue is there a place where something gets set right again. The one handover that is different is the one outside the company: there somebody stands with a checklist and judges where the condition has got to over the years — a vehicle going back off lease.

The places that give it away first

The steering wheel, the gear lever and the armrest. That is where every hand lands, and that is where leather or Alcantara picks up a shine first — oil from fingers gets pressed into the surface and light comes off it differently. On Alcantara you see it soonest, because the nap lies down and stops looking matte — and what can be done about a steering wheel like that is covered in Alcantara on the steering wheel goes shiny.

The seat that gets readjusted several times a week. The bolster on the entry side takes a hit every time somebody gets in, and the fabric along the front edge of the cushion stretches out.

Cup holders and storage compartments. Each person leaves something small behind and nobody throws it out, because it is not theirs.

The ventilation. The smell that settles into a car is something nobody connects to a cause once it has passed through several drivers. It comes from the moisture that stays in the ventilation, and the next person behind the wheel simply takes it as a property of that car. Where the smell sits in the ventilation, and why neither sprays nor ozone treatment removes it, is explained in the car smells from the ventilation.

A regular visit restores the same starting condition

There is only one way to prepare for a handover: put a visit in front of it. And not one visit — a regularity the company arranges in advance, based on how the vehicle is actually driven. The car then keeps returning to the same starting point, and the driver taking the keys does not inherit what the one before them left behind.

A basic interior clean is part of all three levels of care, so this is dealt with even at the lowest one. What the higher levels add to it is on the company fleet care page.

The difference between what a single visit evens out and what has to be maintained continuously is covered in short-term and long-term condition.

Tell us how many people rotate through the vehicles and how often the keys change hands. We will set the rhythm from that, so a visit falls between two handovers rather than in the middle of somebody’s week. A programme is built from four vehicles a month upwards; what a company buys for that price is set out in is looking after company cars worth it.

Send an enquiry