Given the size and importance of Britain’s fleet industry, you might think that there is broad agreement on how many company car drivers it caters for.
But it turns out that more people agree on how much coffee there is in Brazil (an awful lot, apparently) than how many company car drivers there are in the UK.
A quick internet search turns up various numbers that have been quoted in the last couple of years, including a million, 1.2 million, 1.8 million, 2.8 million and, of course, three million.
That last figure simply won’t go away – it still crops up in newspaper articles and is also a favourite with companies selling safe driving courses and risk assessments – perhaps because more drivers mean more risks for companies to worry about.
It’s all the more surprising that this apocryphal figure has hung around so long because there never was a time when three million drivers had a company car.
If we define a company car driver as someone who pays company car tax, then HMRC’s statistics record that the perk peaked in popularity at 1.9 million drivers in 1995.
That’s well short of three million but still impressive in its way, since it equated to a company car for one in every 12 of the working population.
Some of the confusion is undoubtedly down to inexact nomenclature: the meaning of ‘company car’ gets stretched to cover what most of us would regard as grey fleet.
On that definition, the number would be more like five million although the privately-owned 80% of the total only account for 13% of business miles according managers questioned for our current Fleet Management Report.
What is clear is that the number of car benefit taxpayers fell between the mid-90s and the mid-2000s, as more companies offered cash alternatives, and it’s now reached its present day level of … and that’s just it, nobody knows.
You have to rifle back through HMRC’s files until five years ago to find their most recent firm figure for company cars, which was 1.2 million.
We’ll have to wait until to June get a better idea of the real size of the market for taxable cars when HMRC is scheduled to publish data for the years up to 2010-11.
In the meantime, we’ll have to be content with a guesstimate of around over a million.
Whatever anyone says, that’s an undeniable testament to the enduring appeal of the company car, which is only exceeded in popularity as a benefit by private health cover.
Come to think of it, 1.2 million drivers would fill the 80,000-seater London Olympic stadium for the whole of the Games fortnight bar the last afternoon.
Pretty impressive – although a few of them would doubtless complain to their fleet manager because they’d missed the 100 metres final and the closing ceremony!
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