Kia Motors UK’s new Fleet Market Attitudes report for 2015[1], has revealed that while cost of ownership that will traditionally be the main deciding factor when choosing fleet vehicles appearance and environmentally friendly features are scoring highly.
Tasked with the job of pleasing a fleet of drivers, the top three reasons for those respondents who manage fleets when choosing their most predominant fleet models are:
Appearance – 43 per cent
Environmentally friendliness – 42 per cent
Fuel efficiency – 32 per cent
Eco friendly, hybrids and EVs are increasingly being considered as more models become available. According to fleet managers, the eco-friendly proportion of their fleet will increase to 42 per cent in the next five years, reflecting the fact that being more environmentally friendly is just as important as the appearance of a vehicle.
However in order to consider changing their organisation’s entire fleet to eco-friendly models, fleet managers have said they would want to see an average saving on fuel of £483 on each car per year. According to the fleet managers we asked, their average CO2 emissions are around 134g/km, so with Kia’s new Sportage targeting CO2 under 120g/km, there will be another option on the market to help satisfy the desire to reduce emissions.
Once the car is within the fleet the top reported method of working cost efficiently as identified by the sample of fleet managers is setting vehicle budgets per employee grade, followed by monitoring the total cost of ownership and setting KPIs associated to costs for the running of the vehicle. Kia offers Care-3, which gives operators a competitive fixed price package on the first three services, which may come as good news to the 17% who admitted budget worries when it comes to servicing their fleet.
Road incidents and accidents are hitting UK businesses’ pockets, with fleet managers reporting an average of 17 incidents and 14 accidents per year. Individually UK businesses spend an average of £11,256 each per year covering these incidents and accidents, which in turn is costing UK businesses a total of £7.5bn a year[2].
The new insights show the importance of safety features such as all-round camera technology and lane departure warning, just some of Kia’s technologies which ultimately help to eliminate those incidents that businesses have to pay for.
John Hargreaves, Head of Fleet and Remarketing at Kia Motors UK comments, “What our research clearly shows us is that while cost efficiency is high on the fleet manager’s agenda, it might not always be the deciding factor when choosing cars for their fleet. There are many things to consider outside of costs such as employee satisfaction and providing benefits that will attract new employees, and also the image the business may want to portray in their choice of vehicle. It is also interesting to see that eco-friendly features such as ISG and efficient engines are now as important as the appearance of the car.”
