Is Looking After Company Cars Worth It

A company is already paying to have its vehicles washed today, it just doesn’t have it as one line on one invoice. One car goes through the drive-through wash at a petrol station, another gets washed by the driver, the next one comes in for an interior clean only once the cabin has become genuinely unbearable. Whoever looks after the fleet cannot put that sum back together at the end of the year — it broke up into other people’s invoices. That is the question a fleet programme answers: what this costs the company once somebody works it out in advance.

The price is for one visit by one vehicle

The programmes are levels of the same visit, not flat monthly fees. Operational is a wash on the outside and a basic interior clean, with a recommended rhythm of once a month. Extended adds the door shuts, the badges and the trims on top of that — the places where dirt holds on longest — and runs 4 to 6 times a year. Representative adds chemical decontamination of the paint and a sealant, 1 to 2 times a year, and it is for the vehicles that get driven out to customers. A higher programme replaces the lower one in that month rather than being added to it.

The rhythm is a recommendation, not a number of visits included in the price. And because the price is per visit, the yearly cost of one vehicle is the sum of the visits that actually happen — not a flat fee charged for a month the vehicle stood still. A typical make-up for a passenger car is nine Operational visits, two Extended and one Representative over the year; the amounts for that make-up come in the quote.

Why the work on a fleet goes faster

Vehicles from one fleet get washed one after another. Nothing gets moved around in between, the chemistry and the sequence don't change, so the work on one vehicle takes less time than on a car that arrives on its own. That is why every one of the programmes comes out cheaper than the same work ordered as individual services from the standard price list.

It shows up most clearly on Operational. That is the cheapest programme, and the time spent on the vehicle makes up the largest share of its price — so when that time gets shorter, almost the whole line item comes down with it. What it comes to for a particular fleet is something we work out in the quote.

Washing a car so the paint is left without swirl marks is a different job

Washing a car so that no swirl marks are left in the paint has its own method, its own chemistry and its own order of steps, and the practice for it is built up by repetition. Nobody does it well the first time. When a vehicle gets washed by somebody who comes to it once a month in between other work, the company pays for the working time and the paint still ends up with swirl marks. Why company vehicles get into that state faster is covered in company cars age faster, and separately for a vehicle that changes drivers.

The terms have two sides

For the price of the programme, a company is buying rhythm. In return we need some freedom over the dates: the studio sets the dates for the individual vehicles according to the workshop's capacity, on weekdays outside peak hours. A programme is put together from 4 vehicles a month and the contract runs for 12 months. Collecting a vehicle from up to 25 km from the studio is part of the price. For 10 to 24 vehicles the discount is −5 %, for 25 and above −10 %; it applies to the programmes, not to preparation for a lease return. Soiling beyond what the programme covers is dealt with as an extra step, always once the company has agreed to it.

We also offer preparation for a lease return on its own, without a programme; what gets assessed on a vehicle at handover is in the article on a vehicle going back off lease.

Where to start

Tell us how many vehicles you have and how they get used. We'll recommend a programme for each of them on that basis, and you'll get the price per visit in the quote. Everything we do for fleets is on the fleet care page.

Send an enquiry