How can Government help you to push ULEVs into the market and into you company car and van operations?

Monica Guise: It’s gathering pace now. I don’t know if the Government needs to change anything. More and more people are getting into the vehicles and it’s a culture change. You can’t force that.

Paul Vecchione: Benefit-in-kind this year is 0%. In three years' time it’s going to be 13% on vehicles with CO2 emissions of 51-75g/km so it’s a massive move of the goal posts.

Adrian Harris: Then there is going to be a 3% reduction in diesel so that’s an incentive to go diesel.

Jonathan Mitchell: The Treasury decided that pitching the benefit-in-kind at the levels they have was sufficient to continue to incentivise uptake. Benefit-in-kind is only one factor in a wholelife cost decision; the cost of vehicles is coming down significantly. I’m not saying benefit- in-kind is off the table, what I am saying is actually EVs aren’t getting such a raw deal. There is a long-term commitment to make sure there is an incentive to go electric, relative to internal combustion engine, albeit it isn’t zero forever. But it was never going to be.

Matt Bristow: If the differential between a traditional combustion engine and an electric vehicle is maintained that works, but isn’t there a risk that grey fleets will creep more and more back into the equation if the overall cost of the company car might increase? In which case then we’ll start to lose control of the potential to manage emissions if the overall tax cost goes up.

Jonathan Mitchell: If that turns out to be an issue then Government will certainly look at it.

Matt Bristow: It’s a different slant on the whole issue, just to know where the tipping point is before we start to lose control of the grey fleet again. At what point does it become a complete barrier to entry to operate a company car versus a mechanism to maintain a differential? I think is an interesting equation.

Is CO2 likely to remain the major focal point as far as company car taxation is concerned?

Baroness Kramer: We’re going to be coming up to a general election so it’s even more difficult to give you some sense of direction. I can’t see any Government stepping away from CO2. It seems to me that all across the piece you’ve heard a commitment. There is a very strong commitment on greenhouse gases. We’ve just had the fourth carbon package. I can’t see that disappearing. On the other hand, air quality issues are really important and there is a heightened awareness and they have huge public resonance. People who think the green agenda is nuts will stop me on the street and say ‘when are you getting the poison out of my air?’ because that’s somehow very real in a very direct way. I think the CO2 agenda remains. If anything, it will toughen up rather than ease off. I think NOX will also come into play.

Jonathan Mitchell: I agree entirely. If you’re looking at benefit-in-kind it’s likely to remain with the CO2 focus that it has at the moment. But it’s absolutely right to point to air quality as an increasing issue of concern. But taxation isn’t the only way to deal with these issues. There are all sorts of other measures that Government currently employs, and could potentially employ in the future, to tackle that sort of issue. You could point to the Congestion Charge Zone, the Ultra Low Emission Zone. There are a number of tools at Government’s disposal but air quality is not an issue that is about to go away. For fleets driving around in diesel vehicles, I suggest that you would disproportionally get the negative PR stick - not to mention the negative Government stick potentially as well. So it is a very real issue.

Baroness Kramer: There has been a big trend to devolution and I don’t see that changing. CO2 is something you have to tackle absolutely at a national, international level whereas with NOX I think because the impact can often be so localised I think probably it will get much more driven by local government. That’s my general sense of it. I wouldn’t want to pretend that a new government coming in might not decide that indeed they want to push harder on NOX.

Monica, you’re running hydrogen, what have your findings been? It’s very much a fuel of the future as far as most people are concerned but you’ve got quite a lot of experience.

Monica Guise: We’re lucky in the Midlands because we’ve got hydrogen fuelling stations in Coventry, Loughborough, and Nottingham. We’re exploring with Birmingham City Council to see if we can get a public hydrogen fuelling station. Germany is in a stronger position than we are, they are running them from one city to the next. I think it could be a few years before we get to that stage. As far as we are concerned we are happy to continue that.

The manufacturers around the table, it’s always talked about that there is no one solution, no wining technology. Is that still the case?

Barry Beeston: We don’t see any one power source taking the whole of the market. Electric vehicles for Nissan will be part of our make-up but will never take 100% of it.

Matt Bristow: Our R&D is multi-facetted in terms of what we look at it.

Mike Hawes: There are different markets. What may work in Italy may not be the same solution in Russia. That’s one of the reasons why we have a diverse approach. It’s the right car, the right technology, for the right usage. Manufacturers have to match the right technology to the consumer.

Does the idea of a range of options fill fleet managers with dread - the fact that there are so many different discussions you could be having with your company car drivers or internally from a financial point of view?

Jo Hammonds: From a commercial point of view we’ve always chosen the right product for the right job and that involves size, weight and how much it carries. We’re used to picking the right tool for the right job. When it comes to powertrains I think it does make it more difficult. The more options out there the more wary leasing companies are going to be about supporting a particular type of technology to give you a good price for that second life cycle which is key for our pricing. It makes it more complicated definitely.

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