The 2018 Fleet Barometer report is the result of an annual research conducted by the Corporate Vehicle Observatory, a neutral knowledge sharing platform dedicated to all corporate fleet stakeholders, both private and public companies. The results of this year’s edition were made public in mid-June and seem to provide a complete picture of how European fleets are confident about their future growth, still count on leasing as a reliable source of funding, and are increasingly reliant upon telematics and new technologies. For the 2018 research, more than 3000 fleet managers across a range of European countries were interviewed. Let’s review the survey outcome point by point!
#1 - Hybrid and electric vehicle growth. According to the CVO FB report, 30% of very large fleets have already switched to electric vehicles, and 27% to hybrids. Both large and very large fleets indicate they want to accelerate this trend in the years to come, with small and medium fleets planning to follow suit. Companies are increasingly concerned about their CO2 targets, and the trend towards alternative powertrains is seen as a future prospect or concern to be debated by 32% of the small fleets interviewed (48% for large fleets). The increasing stress is attributed to the pressures of Corporate Social Responsibility, and the stricter WLTP test is also seen as a contributing factor.
#2 - Interest in mobility technology and telematics. European fleets seem to be interested in mobility alternatives such as car sharing or ride sharing services, but fleet managers are increasingly interested in car-sharing and ride-sharing as mobility alternatives for their company. Mobility budgets and telematics are also becoming more popular, as almost a third of large and very large companies have telematics tools in place in at least part of their fleets, mainly for vehicle tracking, journey optimisation, lowering fuel costs and improving safety. Particularly important was the UK result with 50% of the interviewed companies there making use of telematics (some way above the European average). As for the individual reasons for telematics implementation: 60% of the interviewed confirmed they chose telematics to improve global driver safety, 55% to improve driver behaviour, 74% of companies use it to locate vehicles, 61% to optimize journeys and 59% to reduce the global fleet costs.
#3 - Whole business confidence has increased. Large fleets expressed the highest confidence in future fleet growth: 27% of them anticipate a growth in their size, but smaller ones also seem to be reasonably confident as 13% of them do expect fleet growth. Overall, small and medium-sized companies are most confident in the UK.
#4 - Full-service leasing as preferred financing option. Very large company fleets (51%) and large company fleets (38%) seem to prefer operational leasing as a financing option. This is hardly a new trend: leasing has been a preferred option for large to very large companies for a long time, and the figures mentioned above are fairly stable over time. But this seems to be something that SMEs—who traditionally have not used leasing as a financing method for their fleets—are tentatively moving towards. The share of small businesses choosing the lease option has increased from 9% to 17% in the last 3 years. For medium-sized companies, the increase is from 17% to 21%.
