BUSINESS Car Manager partner, FleetLine, is now going to provide an alternative to contract hire – car sharing.
However, while its contract hire deals are open to small businesses, currently its car sharing programme is only available to its staff in a bid for the Milton Keynes firm to reduce further its CO2 emissions.
Car sharing is growing rapidly. It reduces CO2 emissions by taking cars off the road; reduces congestion because there are fewer cars on the road; and reduces the travelling costs for both staffers and businesses.
Business research and consulting firm Frost & Sullivan estimates that approximately 980 carsharing programmes exist globally. By 2016, it says, Europe and North America combined should account for over 9 million members sharing 150,000 vehicles through more than 450 programmes. Each vehicle under the car sharing programme is expected to remove between five to eight cars from the roads.
FleetLine has teamed up with car sharing programme experts Carbon Heroes to introduce a new car sharing initiative that aims to reduce unnecessary business miles travelled by employees both to and from work and in-between offices.
Carbon Heroes will provide FleetLine with a branded website that all employees can access to log their various journey details. The system will then match these journeys with any colleagues making similar trips and recommend opportunities for car sharing.
As well as providing the facility for organising these trips, the system also provides reporting on the savings made in terms of CO2 emissions.
“Reducing our personal carbon emissions is something everyone is talking about,” said Richard Bunn, brand director at FleetLine. “We decided that as well as promoting low emission vehicles to our customers, we will do something ourselves to help reduce our own carbon footprint.”
Mr Bunn said that FleetLine had been trialling car sharing on an informal basis for the past 12 months. However, using the Carbon Heroes website would provide FleetLine with a structured system for employee organised travel arrangements.
“As well as making it simple to organise, we are also able to produce reports on the actual amount of CO2 we are saving as a company and also individually,” added Mr Bunn.
Emission saving programme takes cars off road
