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547 – Visit to Streetcar car club

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24 January 2011

FUNNY how Christmas parties can throw up all sorts of unexpected connections.

Along with Alison – my wife and co director of Business Car Manager – we were invited to a dinner party that had, our hosts explained, a car ‘theme’. Our role was obvious.

What I wasn’t expecting was to end up in conversation over a glass of wine with Adebo Abayomi, who, it turns out, was a consultant to Streetcar looking after the disposal of the car club’s cars.

Adebo suggested I should come along to visit the west London offices and meet the team: in January I hitched a lift in Adebo’s rather swish BMW and set off to meet Andrew Valentine, the director of Streetcar.

In fact Andrew has now become the director of the combined Streetcar and Zipcar operation since Zipcar had bought out Streetcar to become the biggest car club operator in the UK (see the news story Zipcar buys out Streetcar car club).

“Zipcar is the leading car club in the US, and Streetcar is the leader in the UK,” explains Andrew in his Wimbledon, west London office, adding that the monopolies commission had just cleared the purchase. Streetcar will gradually rebrand to Zipcar because it’s a global brand, says Andrew.

Personally, I believe car clubs can be really useful allies for small businesses, allowing them access to cars on a pay-on-use basis: no overheads, just a straightforward business expense. As long as a car club car is close to your office, of course.

And it’s this business-to-business area that Andrew wants to grow.

“The key issue is awareness,” says Andrew. “Once businesses start using a car club, the service sells itself and takes away the burden of a business owning and maintaining a company car. This is particularly the case with pool cars. Pool cars are so inefficient. You can replace four pool cars with two of ours,” reckons Andrew. “Once the cost benefits are made clear, using a Streetcar or Zipcar quickly adds up.”

I should add that a pool car, if you are not aware of this term, refers to a business-owned vehicle that is used by all staff for business-related journeys. As long as the car is not taken home there is no company car tax incurred. The drawback with pool cars is that they are rarely looked after properly, which affects their value and also raises issues over a company’s responsibilities on providing staff a vehicle that is fit for purpose.

“When we provide a car you know it’s properly serviced, it will be fuelled, insured for business and we also check the driver’s licence. All a business has to do is book the car,” adds Andrew.

So you can expect a big push from the newly combined Zipcar/Streetcar car club aimed at everything from a small high street business right through to the public sector.

Leading the UK’s arm of what is now the largest global car club, you would expect Andrew to have had some previous experience in the car world before starting up Streetcar back in 2004 with the other founding partner Brett Akker, both pals from university. On the contrary, says Andrew.

“It was the first business we had started. We were blessed with ignorance! In fact, I think it helped, because we had no preconceptions. We used technology to offer a different service. The idea came from the terrible experience of daily van rental service when we wanted to move house. So we knew what we didn’t want as well as knowing that our aim was to provide rental that was dramatically easier.”

Andrew says growing the van side of the business is also part of the aim for 2011. Along with welcoming the staff from Zipcar – currently based on London’s Southbank – to the Streetcar offices in Wimbledon as the integration of both firms continues.

So there’s a lot of business for Andrew and his team to conduct now that the purchase by Zipcar has been given the go-ahead. Which also means there should now be a wider selection of vehicles and locations for your business to try out a car club – if you believe it would suit your company.

Editor’s Blog: Conversation with Andrew Valentine

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Ralph Morton

Ralph Morton

Ralph Morton is an award-winning journalist and the founder of Business Car Manager (now renamed Business Motoring). Ralph writes extensively about the car and van leasing industry as well as wider fleet and company car issues. A former editor of What Car?, Ralph is a vastly experienced writer and editor and has been writing about the automotive sector for over 35 years.

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