HR and benefits professionals may have recently paused for thought over a newspaper headline that read: ‘Costs end love affair with car’.
Apparently, 25% of people surveyed by a car rental company believe that it is less important to own a car today than it was 10 years ago.
Obviously, a rental company has an axe to grind here – less car ownership means more potential business for companies like it – but the story has a point.
There’s noticeably less money to go round these days. That fact alone is enough to focus attention towards cars’ utility and away from any abstract qualities that one might conceivably fall in love with.
But we shouldn’t fall into the trap of believing that the enduring appeal of cars (and, by extension, car benefits) is solely about the heart, not the head.
When the car rental survey report said that two-thirds of people described their car as “purely to get from A to B”, it made it sound like a fall from grace; even though it’s not very different from saying that most people use radios “purely to listen to broadcasts”.
Getting from A to B is what cars are mainly about. In most parts of the country, cars are people’s primary, often only, means of reaching work, shops and social activities.
Cars’ utility explains why people invest so much time and money in them, and why they’ve retained their value as a benefit-in-kind.
Although company car numbers have declined, of the £3 billion in revenues that the Government collects annually on more than 20 taxable benefits, company cars account for nearly half.
As well as their obvious usefulness as mechanisms for recruiting, rewarding and retaining key personnel, they fulfil more subtle employment functions.
For example, Government data shows that company car drivers commute longer distances than private car owners: company cars allow employers to spread their net wider when recruiting – especially in today’s moribund housing market.
The grain of truth in the rental company’s survey is that cars, like everything else these days, need to earn their keep. It’s also worth noting that ‘ownership’ of a car is very different to ‘access’ to a car. A lot of company-owned metal spends much of its time parked outside offices during the day and homes at night, so one way to get more return on investment in business cars would be to put more drivers behind each one’s wheel.
And why not make extra revenue by hiring your fleet cars out in non-working hours to employees who don’t possess their own wheels? The technology to do so is already there for the taking.
Today’s company car is becoming tomorrow’s versatile mobility solution: a popular perk that’s becoming more productive as employers respond to new opportunities to increase their availability and usage.
Changing times are altering people’s relationship with cars but it certainly won’t come to an end any time soon.
