Cars have become such an essential part of life that it’s really hard to imagine the world without them, and the immeasurable livelihood brought to people throughout history. Many businesses and individuals have flourished from the production, sales, and renting of vehicles.
Cars, vans, and trucks are indispensable for everyday commerce in today’s world. They are not only used for transportation purposes but are also for cargo services, deliveries, and many other purposes. Companies tend to buy or lease a fleet of vehicles in order to run their day to day operations. The need for all types of vehicles has opened another type of business opportunity and many businesses have capitalized on it. This is the reason why we see so many vehicle fleet companies today that lease, manage and products to help manage the vehicles in a fleet.
A vehicle fleet management company is simply a company that usually owns a huge fleet of cars, then leases the vehicles back to their customers. These companies mostly target bigger corporations that normally require a large fleet (15 to multiple thousand) of cars, trucks, or vans for their businesses to flourish. For example, a company that delivers bottled water definitely needs a fleet of trucks or vans for transportation purposes. Now, if the company decides to buy these vehicles all at once, it would cost a fortune because transportation vehicles are very expensive, even with bulk discounts. So, the best, most economical solution for many companies is to lease their fleet. This is how a vehicle fleet company usually does business.
These fleet management companies also provide other management services including maintenance, fuel, accident, safety, registration and titling, as well as other services like telematics, personal use reporting. Further, these fleet management companies provide service and technology technology tools for their customers- even apps for the fleet manager and drivers to use.
Businesses that buy or lease more than 10 vehicles are often considered as commercial buyers, and they are treated as special customers by the vehicle fleet companies and vehicle manufacturers.
Using a fleet management company typically translates into operating fleet at a much more efficient, and lower cost, than typical vehicle owners due to the volume and other economies of scale they are able to produce.
For example, a fleet management may have well over 100,000 vehicles spread out between hundreds of clients. This affords them to get bulk pricing on services like maintenance and repair from the largest providers. They also are able to get better financial borrowing arrangements from lenders so they can lease the vehicles to their customers at a very favorable interest rate.
Fleet companies provide their customer sophisticated web technology tools to order vehicles, and manage their fleet including see their fleet costs.
Offshoot companies ranging from telematics providers for tracking their vehicles have proliferated. And now, with the changing definition of fleet due to companies like Uber, Lyft, Instacart and more are beginning to surface. the companies range from Fair to CarAdvise.
So while the fleet lessors have been around since the 1940’s the industry has changed dramatically with the onset of technology, and is changing at an even more brisk pace as fleets change with the gig economy. Regardless, companies still often need vehicles to operate their business.
