As winter tyres have wider grooves and more sideways grooves they provide improved grip when driving on slush, snow and ice, making vehicles safer on the roads.

That translates into shorter braking distances, reducing the risk of a crash: at 20mph a car or van with winter tyres will stop 11 metres sooner on icy roads than if fitted with summer tyres; at 30mph the braking distance on snowy roads is reduced by eight metres.

Tests conducted by the British Tyre Manufacturers Association found that a car fitted with winter weather tyres and braking at 60mph on a wet road at 5°Celsius stopped five metres sooner, equivalent to more than one car length.

Adrian Walsh, director of automotive industry-backed RoadSafe, which is a leading forum for promoting and devising solutions to road safety problems, said: “Many European drivers routinely switch to winter tyres in the cooler and wetter months and in some countries it’s a legal requirement.

"Given the recent harsh winters here, it is wise for UK drivers to swap their tyres now. Winter tyres improve safety and help keep traffic moving in difficult wet and icy conditions.”

Environmental management

It is quite common for fast-fits such as Kwik-Fit to be asked about our ‘green’ credentials when submitting tenders to Britain’s major fleet companies such as Motability, contract hire companies and vehicle rental providers.

Taking Kwik-Fit as an example, for many years we have been at the forefront of ensuring that tyres collected from our centres are reprocessed rather than sent to landfill sites.

As our range of services extended to embrace brake replacement, vehicle servicing and MOT work, we have worked with waste management companies to dispose of all waste products.

In fact, Kwik-Fit views worn-out parts not as rubbish, but as the raw product for something else.

The fleet industry – suppliers and their fleet customers – must work together to ensure tyres, exhausts, batteries and other vehicle parts and fluids are not being illegally dumped or stockpiled.

Fleets need to be sure that waste is being disposed of in the correct way and, where possible, recycled to create other resources.

In 2008, our ‘green’ ethos was significantly increased with the opening of our £10 million National Distribution Centre in Corby, Northamptonshire.

The 245,000 square feet complex – the size of 10 football pitches – stocks up to 300,000 tyres across in 650 different sizes and guarantees next-day delivery to our 670 centres and more than 200 mobile fitting units.

Previously it could take up to three days for tyres to be delivered depending on suppliers, but now online ordering means stocks are replenished and customer requirements met daily.

The proliferation of tyre sizes has meant we had to have our own distribution operation rather than relying on tyre manufacturers to deliver tyres to centres, which can take several days.

Ensuring tyres are in tip-top condition is vital for road safety. While customers are prepared to wait overnight, if necessary, for a replacement tyre, they do not want to wait a few days. We are now masters of our own destiny.

Simultaneously, a process of ‘reverse logistics’ has been introduced so that once one of our 69 trucks has delivered tyres to one of our five distribution hubs or a centre, the scrap tyres, tyre casings and catalytic converters are loaded in just eight minutes.

This industry first ‘one-for-one exchange’ means our trucks travel fully loaded, saving up to three million miles a year and around 3,000 tonnes of CO2.

We remove more than six million tyres and almost 40,000 tons of tyre casings from cars and vans annually.

Once these items are returned to Corby, tyres are sorted and shredded on site for use in cement kilns and as aggregate replacement for use in artificial sports pitches, equine surfaces and children’s playgrounds. Catalytic converters are collected by contractors and sold on the worldwide scrap metal market.

Other material recycled includes:

• Around 1.5 million exhausts removed annually are collected by contractors and sold as scrap metal, along with spark plugs, shock absorbers, zinc balance weights and hundreds of thousands of brake pads, brake discs and hydraulic cylinders. Brake callipers are re-used by manufacturers.
• Precious metals such as rhodium, palladium and platinum are extracted from more than 650,000 old catalytic converters removed annually.
• Thousands of batteries are reprocessed with the lead extracted and re-used, battery casings are reprocessed as plastic and acid is treated and disposed of in line with hazardous waste regulations.
• Almost 500,000 litres of waste oil is reprocessed and used as marine oil and as fuel in a number of factories including steelworks.
• Aluminium from oil and fuel filters is compacted and sold to aluminium smelters and the waste oil reprocessed and sold as industrial fluid along with waste brake fluid.
• Thousands of litres of anti-freeze are sent to specialist chemical extraction processors.
• Air filters are disposed of with general waste via local authority wheeled bin collections. Paper and cardboard waste is separated for reprocessing.

In 2009 we were proud to have our environmental responsibility acknowledged by leading financial services company Legal & General, which gave us their Supply Chain ‘Make a Difference’ (MAD) Award.

This recognises suppliers who make a significant improvement in their environmental or other corporate social responsibility impacts, including employee relations and community involvement. 

In making the award, Legal & General said: “It’s important that, as a large FTSE50 company, we co-operate with our suppliers to improve standards of operation for our own clients.

"Kwik-Fit Fleet was chosen as the winner on the basis of its commitment to the environment. The judges recognised the significant benefits realised from the company’s initiative in creating a National Distribution Centre as well as its tangible achievement in tyre recycling.”

Please tell us how Kwik-Fit operates in the fleet market and how it helps fleet managers keep company car and vans mobile

Whether running a handful of vehicles or one of the UK’s large corporate fleets, Kwik-Fit Fleet has a plethora of services to ensure maximum company car and van efficiency and minimum vehicle downtime.

I’ve already told you about our call centre in Scotland, 670 High Street centres and fleet of 200 mobile units.

Supporting our customers is an experienced team of account managers who are located across the UK and operate out of Kwik-Fit Fleet’s headquarters in St Albans.

As well as our menu of fleet services, our range of solutions includes comprehensive online fleet management reporting designed to make company car and van administration as simple and as straightforward as possible.

We offer long opening hours, UK-wide locations, a policy of national pricing and highly-trained staff.

Our comprehensive range of fleet services makes Kwik-Fit the undisputed No.1 choice for fleet decision-makers and drivers.

We invest in innovation, state-of-the-art technology and customer service to ensure we deliver a consistent service level across the country.

That may be a bold claim, but it is supported by the fact that since Kwik-Fit Fleet was created in 1987 – Kwik-Fit itself launched in 1971 – we have won 73 awards from fleet publications and customers.

These include being named Fleet Supplier of the Year by Fleet News in the publication’s annual awards in 2009.

Over the years we have won many awards from Fleet News and Fleet Van, but winning the Fleet Supplier of the Year Award was particularly pleasing because we were competing against other high-quality businesses across all industry sectors.

The Fleet Supplier of the Year Award is designed to identify the organisation which has gone the extra mile in providing exceptional service to fleet customers, has ‘stand-out’ service levels, products and staff and a commitment to providing the best products or services.

The independent panel of judges commented: “Kwik-Fit took this award by storm, convincing the judges with an entry that confirmed it not only as this year’s fleet supplier of the year but also a supplier that is a true industry supporter.

"During the judging, there was an astonishingly comprehensive vote in favour of Kwik-Fit.”

For many years, we have been the number one fast-fit provider to the corporate sector, but the award officially ranked Kwik-Fit Fleet among the entire industry’s crème de la crème.

But, such success is not luck. It is due to the services offered and the people Kwik-Fit employs and the training they receive.

Whether account managers, call centre staff or technicians based in centres or driving our mobile units, delivering top-notch customer service is crucial to success in a cut-throat marketplace.

In a challenging economic environment we expect corporate demand for our range of centre and mobile services to further increase in 2011 and beyond, due to a range of factors.