We started by asking Taylor where he thought E-C3 and C3 fleet sales were going to come from?  

He said: “More of the same really, but there’s a new opportunity – salary sacrifice. We are in sal-sac, and what we’ll see, is for the 20% taxpayer, the opportunity with the E-C3 will lie there. 

“The democratisation of electric mobility is a real opportunity for us, it’s something we’re focused on, and we’re meeting a lot of the providers as well. They’re spending a lot of time in the car.

“Leasing as well – we’ve met with several of them at the beginning of March and presented the car again to them. We have several test drives and presentations planned as well. 

“It is a massive step change for us from the last C3 to this one – it’s a completely night and day difference. So, fleets who have drifted away from Citroen, drifted away from C3, they will come back to us. There is going to be a lot of conquest business.

“We’ve seen fleet customers migrate from old C3 Aircross to new C3, because the new C3 is the bridge car to a B-segment hatch – this sits somewhere in between. There’s a real opportunity there, as the new car is impressively spacious inside, considering its small footprint. Ultimately electric cars are expensive, but ours are not!”

We moved on to ask Taylor if the new C3 would be an ICE or EV proposition for fleet in the UK?  

He said: “Mainly ICE still – we don’t have a huge ambition to do materially more than the 28% BEV mix this year. We want to keep pace with it, but there’s nothing really to be gained above and beyond that. 

“We believe it will 65:35 in favour of ICE – very slightly ahead of the ZEV mandate. We’ve got the powertrain for the channel, we’ve got the powertrain for the consumer, but what we’re not saying, is that we’re going to close off a powertrain sooner than you need to.” 

Our final question for Taylor was whether he thought Citroen would be doing more C3 fleet deals locally at dealers, or at national level? 

He said: “It depends on the scale, several of the dealers in our network are quite prevalent in fleet. They have a lot of contacts with local fleets and councils. So, we will support them if they find business or opportunities. 

“Equally we have our Stellantis fleet team, which will be showcasing the product, and where we win business, will also be working with the dealer network. We tend to work with the dealer network for our own central deals. So, when we negotiate deals centrally, we indirectly sell to them via the dealer network, in terms of establishing that relationship. 

“So, it will be a bit of mix, we may as well use them, we have 120 dealers across the UK – all selling cars day in and day out!”