Back in the day, for my sins, I did a bit of motorway recovery work for a guy I knew, he had a fleet of old but fairly well maintained Ford D series, being no fool he stuck with the straight 6 engine and 6 speed box models, avoided the V8’s etc.
Of course being exempt vehicles you could have a lot of fun, unloaded beavertail + wet road + corner at a junction = you could drift that ass end around as wide as you liked, plus no speed limiters, plus you could do all sorts of things in an exempt vehicle that were illegal in a normal truck or car, plus, he had the po-lice contract to clear shit off the motorways.
It was the last of the glory days of trucking in the UK, even if it wasn’t real trucking…money was good too.
Of course, you’d jump in whatever was available if you got a shout, but we all had our favourites, you know I can’t even find any fucking pictures of the sort of thing on google images now, but they were full double crew cab, solid beavertail body, no hydraulics or moving / tilting bed shit, and solid ramps that you pulled out and put away by hand, but by and large, provided the last guy had left it the way you would, all straps rolled and put away tidy, fuel topped off, ready to rock, you were happy.
Then there was Saddam, he was a Merc, sat at the end of the row, because it was the last truck anyone wanted to take, but, Saddam didn’t have long range tanks, so if one of the guys got called in for a local recovery, they were told to take Saddam, to much abuse and cat calls from anyone else there.
To be fair to Saddam, he didn’t do anything badly, he just wasn’t quite as meaty as the old Fords, he felt more like a 7 tonner scaled up to an 11 tonner, rather than a 17 tonner scaled down to an 11 tonner, if you know what I mean.
In the Ford, you climbed “up” into the seat more, tilt cab over engine, so there was that aspect too.
Put them both on paper and a modern manager would buy a fleet of Saddam’s, on a service contract with the local Merc garage, and old driver like me would opt for the fleet of Fords and one guy whose main job was keeping them all sorted and a couple of guys who could split helping him with some local runs, as and when needed.
Here, today, in the UK, the 1.6 litre diesel “blue-motion” VW Golf car is pretty much the de-facto half decent company car for anyone hitting the road a lot… sales droid, technician, field service, if you don’t need a van, there is a good chance you get a golf diesel. These aren’t bought, they are on full service contract lease, and get chopped back in for new ones either at 3 years old when the first MOT is due, or when they hit 180,000 miles, whichever comes first.
From the company’s point of view, Monday to Friday working week, that costs the company X per day, I’m saying X, cos I’ll come to the numbers in a minute.
So the company are looking at taking school leavers and training them up, modern apprenticeshits in IT stuff, of course this is training and a set of skills that will benefit this particular company, rather than a rounded set of skills, you don’t get to be a car mechanic or diesel fitter, you get to be a specialised and certified nissan leaf technician, who knows how to use the nissan shop diagnostic machines, etc etc.
So they are running the numbers on these supposed apprenticeship places, and the potential cost to the company while they are being trained up, and it doesn’t come to a whole heap of money…. so he comes up with a number and it seems good, from company point of view.
Then one of the other guys pipes up, and says, hang on, we will be giving these guys company cars while they are doing their on the job training aren’t we, the first guy says well duh, yes, they have to get to the customers sites, so the other guy, who is the company’s fleet director, says to the first guy do you know what these cars cost us, per day, based on a 5 day week?
The first guy says no, actually, he doesn’t know a number, but he assumes X is a reasonable number.
So the fleet director drops the little bombshell that X is in fact 180 of her majesty’s pounds sterling every day, based on 5 day week.
When you add £180 a day to the first guy’s cost to the company calculations for some on the job apprenticeships, suddenly the numbers do not seem so reasonable.
Of course, the penny never drops, that there is a *significant*, nay, a MAJORITY proportion of their CURRENT trained and experienced and all that good stuff staff driving around in these cars, who are paid LESS than it costs to provide the car.
And none of them remember the old days, when even if you ended up driving Saddam, back when fuel cost just under half what it costs now, at the dusk of the last good days to be a driver, I’d take home in cash significantly more money than I do now.
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Incidentally, a bluemotion 1.6 diesel as a company car in the UK today, the guvvmint tax figures are it costs you as an employee just under £4,000 per year of your tax free allowance, and 13 pence per mile for fuel for any private mileage…. given they do an average of 50 miles to the imperial gallon, that’s pretty much pump prices, your personal fuel is at cost…. sure, you drive an effectively brand new car, and any and all servicing and tyres etc is all free, as is insurance etc, and at a 30% tax rate that 4k per year tax allowance hit means it costs you £1,300 a year, or £26 a week for this, which is a good deal compared to any other private vehicle except perhaps a motorbike…
The cost comes from the new cost of these cars, £23-25k each, plus service contract, depreciated to nothing over 3 years or less on a corporate lease…. plus fuel, plus insurance.
