Whatever the pre-Easter fuel rush told us about the Government’s managerial abilities, it certainly turned the spotlight on people’s desire for real (as opposed to virtual) mobility.
Although we live in an age when physical travel supposedly takes second place to using Skype or a VPN connection, no-one wasted a minute before filling up their car ahead of the threatened fuel shortage.
Among them were hundreds of thousands of business vehicle users, for whom even a short-lived drought of essential hydrocarbons would have been a serious problem.
But many of the drivers queuing on forecourts didn’t need fuel in the same way. They simply didn’t want to be limited to the range of their usual fill-up of one-third or one-half a tank of fuel if petrol stations closed for a while.
Both groups wanted the same thing – to hang on to ‘mobility-on-demand’ for as long as possible. And they had to pay a price for it. The filling frenzy rapidly pumped several hundred million pounds of extra fuel tax into the Government’s coffers (right at the end of the fiscal year – just fancy that).
In the end the panic quickly subsided and it would be easy to conclude that it was just storm in a jerry can. But I think it held one or two deeper lessons for business vehicle operators.
One, which I’ve mentioned before, is how dependent fleets are on a relatively small, tightly-integrated, easily-disrupted, just-in-time refuelling network.
Could you mitigate that dependence? For example, how many cars on your fleet have a range of over 800 miles per tank? How would you prioritise, and if necessary reallocate, vehicles and fuel in the event of an actual emergency?
The second lesson that can be gleaned from watching drivers queuing patiently to top up tanks and fuel cans is that time and money come a distant second in people’s priorities to the desire to have access to instant mobility.
You could say the same for businesses’ approach to mobility; not so much in regular car fleets but more in the area of occasional car travel, which today tends to be rather loosely and expensively catered-for via a mix of hire cars, taxis and pool cars.
The relative expensiveness of ad hoc car provision wasn’t much of an issue back in the day, when fuel was cheaper and business revenues were on the up. But it’s not a good fit for tomorrow’s considerably leaner and highly productivity-focused fleet environment.
The fuel rush briefly challenged our normal assumptions about enjoying convenient and assured access to petrol and diesel whenever we need them.
And some of our fundamental assumptions about fleet strategy and operation will be challenged in the years ahead – not least by unprecedented energy costs and the once-in-a-generation economic adjustment that Britain and the rest of the OECD economies are going through.
That’s one reason why I’m convinced that mobility will be one of the key areas of fleet policy over the next decade. With new products already emerging on to the market to deliver managed, multi-user, any time access to selected cars on your fleet, it’s an area of great productive potential for employers in tougher times.
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