Businesses build fleets of vehicles for many different reasons. They can be used for delivery, bulk carrying, staff transport, construction, broadcasting, and a great deal more. Building a fleet might seem like a rather straightforward endeavor, but there are plenty of essential details that need to be considered to keep a fleet economically viable, efficient, and useful. Here is a quick guide to some of the things that need to be considered when building a fleet of company vehicles.
Usage
Not every vehicle suits the job! Business owners need to carefully assess their needs before purchasing or leasing fleet components. As a rule of thumb, businesses should find the most fuel-efficient and least complex vehicle that is capable of achieving their aims.
Insurance
Fleetwide insurance is essential. There are many different kinds of commercial insurance options available, suiting the needs of companies employing vehicles for different means. Business car insurance, commercial carrier insurance, and heavy equipment insurance policies are all commonly purchased by businesses looking to offset the financial risks involved with operating a fleet.
Advertising Potential
A fleet of commercial vehicles has huge advertising potential: if you use your vehicles correctly. Heavy trucks are an especially good medium for advertising materials. Advertising content on trucks has to be visually eye-catching and contain as little wording as possible. Too much lettering on a truck and other highway users will have whizzed past long before they can read a marketing message.
Safety And Training
All roadgoing vehicles are inherently dangerous. Cars and trucks are involved in thousands of fatalities every single year across the country. Specialist heavy vehicles require intensive training in order to be operated safely. Education and licensing are very important when building up fleet capabilities. For truck loads over 10,000 lb, operators will need to have a commercial driving license. For forklift trucks, there are equally strict rules. The US Occupational Health and Safety Administration requires forklift drivers to be specially certified. There are countless other special licenses needed for vehicles. If you don’t want to spend money hiring in pre-trained drivers, then you are going to need to invest in education and training to bring your existing staff members up to certification standard on your vehicles.
Environmental Impact
Conscientious and market savvy business owners know the value of keeping a company’s carbon footprint as small as possible. Business fleets typically produce a great deal of carbon dioxide. There are a few ways of minimizing the environmental impact of a commercial fleet.
Choosing quiet travel times minimizes time spent in traffic burning fuel but can damage the advertising impact of a fleet. Powering diesel vehicles with vegetable oil is a noble pursuit but can be impractical when there is no ready source of clean vegetable oil available. Electric commercial vehicles are slowly becoming a practical reality. Although the production of electric vehicles is not great for the environment as a whole, they do reduce the environmental impact of the end-user which is a positive thing.
