Time sharing is making a comeback but instead of apartments on the Costa or a villa in Alsace, this time it's all about sharing company cars. Sixt, the well-known car rental and leasing firm, has launched a new corporate car sharing product. By using it, Sixt claims, companies can save as much as 30 per cent on their company car fleet costs, while there are benefits too to be had in terms of a reduction in Co2 emissions and a potential reduction in traffic congestion.
Conor Kelly, MD of Sixt Leasing Ireland, told the Irish Times that "what we want to do is progress our business in the mobility market. Part of that core business includes Sixt Rent A Car and also Sixt Leasing which operates in as many as 50 countries and we provide what we call mobility solutions. What we're doing is combining all three of those elements into a product Corporate CarSharing.
“We’ve had strong interest. We’ve been speaking to more than 100 companies and we are set to announce our first Irish customer – a large American multinational – towards the end of February, which will be taking a test run of ten vehicles.”
Sixt claims that the savings come from usage, and has found that even private cars are generally only used for about four per cent of the day, leaving many cars with empty, lonely hours standing in car parks or at the side of the street. “If you translate that into a company basis, someone who works in the office but who has to make frequent business trips, they might raise that use to ten per cent, someone who’s out on the road a lot might bring that up to 19-20 per cent.
"The money is saved in terms of higher usage of a smaller amount of vehicles. So for instance a company running a fleet of 50 vehicles could probably cut that down to 40. And not only are they saving on those ten vehicles that they no longer need, but with clever use of the reservation system, and by carefully planning and timing you can then also get more use out of the 40 vehicles. We're dealing with one company in the midlands which was sending ten people to Dublin airport at various times for various business trips. There was no co-ordination and the average cost in terms of expenses that was working out at about €150 a trip, so as much as €6,000 a month. By using Corporate CarSharing, they could have done that with three or four vehicles running at about €600 a month each."
Sixt's scheme covers all of the running costs of the car, as per a standard lease scheme. The company pays the leasing fee and the maintenance fee and Sixt looks after the rest. There is an additional payment for the software and hardware that runs the system – each employee gets a chip card with which gives them access to the car they're using. The idea is that each car is treated much like a meeting room in the office – booked in advance and shared as much as possible. Access to cars can be granted, at the company's discretion, at weekends and on holidays and such access can be treated as a form of employee reward. There's also the option for any employee to 'rent' one of the cars for the weekend for a nominal amount, a feature which Sixt suggests could even make the scheme a small profit-earner.
Which does rather raise the worry that while the system has obvious appeal to the accountants and fleet managers, it might be a different story for the end users – if you’ve ever had a row over booking a meeting room, imagine the fights breaking out over car use…
"The evidence we have is from our parent company in Germany, and companies such as Siemens where the scheme is already in place" says Kelly. "Their experience has been very, very positive, and it's measured by how many times it's used in a 24hr period, and that can be as much as 70-80 per cent. Better still, for the employees, is that there's no BIK worries as these are essentially a pool car."
A foolproof plan? Perhaps and perhaps not. For all the good common sense that the scheme makes on paper, there appear to be quite a few rocks and scissors out there waiting in the margins. For a start, it’s going to be difficult in many instances to convince employees used to having their ‘own’ company car that this is a better system – the old ‘sharing is caring’ phrase is drummed into us from playgroup onwards but it’s a tougher sell to the over-21s. Then there is the public transport issue – clearly, if there are fewer cars to go around then grabbing a bus or train is going to become de rigeur for many and that will potentially limit the scheme to those companies based near vey god public transport links. Then there are concerns that such systems don’t actually bring the environmental and congestion benefits that they claim. A recent survey of Berlin car sharing schemes by a German public services consultancy found that shared-scheme cars were being used far more at weekends than at peak commuting time and were often parked up for as much as 23 hours a day.
And then there’s privacy. With every single kilometre being logged and watched, will those using the cars feel the beady eye of Big Brother upon them? “It’s essentially been viewed very much as a benefit so far” says Kelly. “Certainly during working hours it’s never been an issue, but even in standard rental cars have auto-trackers. There is a benefit too in the sense that the software can also help the driver if they get into difficulty. We can remote unlock the car if the keys get shut in for instance, or we can keep an eye on the fuel and remind the driver to fill up, using the supplied fuel card.”
Currently, Sixt is focusing this product purely on the corporate sphere. There are no plans as yet to roll out a similar private car scheme, although Sixt does have experience in that realm thanks to its continental efforts with BMW and its DriveNow micro-rental setup.
