Determining when exactly to cycle your vehicles is a fine balance among many factors, from acquisition, through operation, and resale or asset disposal. Here are nine questions to answer when you’re deciding when and how to best cycle your trucks.
Extending replacements too long can result in added repair and maintenance costs but replacing a vehicle too soon can leave money on the table in terms of vehicle life.
Your primary goal is to spec a truck to meet the intended job function, but how it is spec’ed has a direct bearing on future resale value. Therefore, it is similarly important to maintain a remarketing mindset when identifying specs.
If an employee threw trash all over the office floor, scratched the paint off the walls, broke the light bulbs, left holes and dents in the wallboard, and skipped routine maintenance on the copier until it overheated and broke, no manager would tolerate this abuse. Yet, that is exactly what some companies tolerate when drivers abuse their company-provided vehicles.
The resale value of a used vehicle is determined by three factors: the unit’s age, total mileage, and overall condition. A used company vehicle in poor condition, because of driver abuse or neglect, will result in lost resale value or incur unnecessary reconditioning expense at auction. Here's what you can do to minimize vehicle abuse.
Many of the dynamics in today’s market are eerily familiar to the resale value softness that occurred in the last decade, which ultimately peaked in 2002. At that time, year-over-year increases of off-lease vehicles entering the wholesale market exerted downward pressure on resale prices. It appears that we are on the same trajectory, with off-lease volumes peaking in 2016. What are you doing to prepare for these different market dynamics?
When selling out-of-service fleet vehicles to employees, companies need to ensure fleet policy is uniformly applied — without exception — and that all buyers are treated uniformly and consistently. If you are involved in individual price negotiations, it is prudent to document the sales process. Auditors want to ensure that policy is being enforced uniformly and consistently throughout the organization. Here's what you need to do to ensure you sail through an internal audit with flying colors.
If you asked fleet managers what the industry average is for personal use of company vehicles, most would say it is approximately 15-18 percent. But, is it? Most of us will agree that some drivers fudge their personal-use mileage, but no one knows by how much. There is a growing suspicion that personal-use mileage is far greater — perhaps substantially greater — than what the industry accepts as conventional wisdom.
Because of historically high resale rates, most commercial fleets no longer sell out-of-service medium- and heavy-duty Class 3-8 trucks to their employees.
Today’s high resale values are an anomaly caused by the shortage of used vehicles in the wholesale market due to the extremely low sales of new vehicles during the 2008-2011 timeframe. Nowadays, everyone is a hero when it comes to getting top dollar for their out-of-service fleet vehicles. However, these artificially high prices will ultimately decline as used-vehicle supply increases.
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