ALD Automotive | LeasePlan research: the future belongs to mobility packages and electric company car

The unpredictability of the recent period also rewrote the rules on the leasing industry: although surprisingly, the rise in fuel prices only posed a minor difficulty for fleet operators, the slow arrival of new cars and the increase in rental fees caused more trouble. In addition, the number of companies that are considering switching to an electric fleet are increasing. We at ALD Automotive | LeasePlan asked more than 200 company leaders and fleet managers at our annual conference about the challenges they faced in the past year and how they see the trends of the near future in the corporate mobility market.

The biggest challenge for the majority of the companies participating in the fleet conference (58%) was the increasing monthly rental fee for new cars, and for a third of the companies, the most significant problem was the slow arrival of new cars. Surprisingly, only 5 percent of the respondents considered the fuel price increase to be the biggest recent challenge in fleet management. It is interesting that the biggest difficulty for some companies was the rethinking of vehicle benefit solutions due to home office is getting more and more frequent – this caused an issue especially for larger companies managing more than 100 cars. The emission of pollutants from traffic is also a significant problem in Hungary for which, at ALD Automotive | LeasePlan, we not only respond with climate protection and biodiversity preservation programs, but also encourage our partners through education, to implement environmental protection actions. The majority of respondents of our survey (57%) also continuously measure emissions at company level and follow an action plan to reduce them. A minority of companies have specific initiatives to offset emissions: a tree planting program works for 13 percent of the respondents, while financial support for compensation projects works for roughly 10 percent of the companies. However, a fifth of the responding companies have not yet dealt with climate protection issues at all – even though a quarter of them are companies with a company fleet of more than a hundred cars. The use of environmentally friendly mobility technologies can be an easy way to reduce corporate emissions, carbon neutrality is not yet the primary consideration when designing fleets in Hungary. According to the respondents, when choosing cars, the predictability of costs is the most important, followed by the quality of services related to the operation of the vehicle fleet. Interesting fact is that the price is only after these, in the third place. The appearance and comfort of the car comes last when a company decides to procure a vehicle.

The company leaders and fleet managers also answered what solutions they would implement in their own companies within 1-3 years, according to the current trends. Based on the answers, most managers are thinking about creating a comprehensive mobility package, which includes public transport or other micromobility and sharing services in addition to the company car, but 45 percent of them are also thinking about electrification of their fleets, which paints a positive picture regarding the future of the carbon neutrality of the fleet industry.