Company Cars Age Faster

It's Friday afternoon and a sales rep's car is parked in the company car park. Dried bird droppings on the rear pillar, a smeared insect on the bonnet, mud on the sill from a site visit earlier in the week. A coffee cup in the holder, paper dust on the passenger seat. There's nothing wrong with the car, it runs, and on Monday it will be out again. And yet it looks older than the work it has actually done.

Nobody bought it and nobody will sell it

Company cars don't age faster because they're driven worse. They age faster because nobody has a relationship with them. The driver isn't the person who chose the car and paid for it, and won't be the person who sells it on. In between, nobody looks after it out of sheer habit, the way people do with a car of their own.

It isn't anybody's fault. It just isn't in anybody's job description.

What that looks like physically

Nobody removes bird droppings or a smeared insect the same day. On a car of your own you notice it because you can see it from the window. A company car has no such window: it stands in a car park nobody looks out at from home, and the first person to look at it is whoever gets into it on Friday — by which point the droppings have been baked onto the paint since midweek and have been etching into it the whole time.

Washing gets put off as long as it still just about passes. Then a brush at the drive-through wash, or a rag from the boot, goes over dirt that has dried on — and the grit sitting in that dirt gets dragged across the whole surface. This is where most of the swirl marks we see arriving on fleet cars come from.

Nobody spots the first swirl mark either, because nobody has anything to compare it against. The memory of how the car looked after the last proper wash simply isn't there. So the defect goes unnoticed until there are enough of them to dull the whole panel. How to tell whether a vehicle is simply dirty right now or its paint is going off is covered in short-term and long-term condition.

Interior cleaning gets whatever time is left between two meetings, in a filling-station car park. Cups and paperwork disappear, because they're visible. Mud in the seat seams, sand in the seat rails and grease on the wheel and the gear lever stay and keep building up: the vacuum at the pump doesn't reach them, and none of the people who get into the car have that set aside within their working hours. On a vehicle where several people take turns behind the wheel, one more thing is added: not one of them received it clean, so none of them has anything to put back the way it was.

A regular rhythm takes the place of a personal bond

You can't order someone to care about a car. You can set a rhythm. That's exactly what our company fleet care is built on: we take the car on as ours, instead of the driver.

The Operational visit washes the car outside and cleans the interior — we recommend it once a month, so dirt never dries on to the point where it does damage. The two higher levels add door shuts, trims and badges, and later chemical paint decontamination and basic paint protection. What each level covers, and what it costs, is set out under company fleet care.

Cars go on the programme from four a month upwards and for twelve months; what the company buys with that, and what the studio needs in return, is set out in is looking after the cars worth it for a company.

Tell us how many cars you run and which of them go out to customers. Those two figures are enough for us to suggest where to start with your fleet.

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