Seeing my colleagues' Octavia this morning and neighbours' Audi highlighted two polar opposites in the treatment of company cars. The Octavia (L & K TD140) is an 06/55 plate and been mercilessly abused since day one. Despite the cream leather interior it is used as a glorified van and not been cleaned inside once since new. Rubbish, scuffs and mud adorn every surface. The exterior gets a forecourt car wash once every 6 months if it's lucky. The engine is thrashed from cold and never left to tickover for 30 secs after a long journey and oil is only topped up when the warning light flickers. Despite this treatment it runs sweetly and has never given a moments problem after 60k miles.
The 06 Audi is pampered from dawn till dusk. It is cleaned inside and out up to 3 times a week (or the moment it gains a speck of grime), monthly it is jacked up and all the alloys are removed for a deep clean and the fluids/tyres are checked twice weekly minimum. Basically it is run to the letter of the law as per the owners manual and even has a small rubber mat to protect the carpet on the transmission tunnel between the rear seats. However, it runs no better than the Octavia and always seems to be in and out of the dealer for teething problems.
Anyone want to lay claim to the most pampered or abused company car and beat the above examples?
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I accidentally found that one of my staff hadn't put his car in for a service in over 60,000 miles! He claimed it 'ran as sweet as a nut', but hadn't even checked the oil in that time!
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Ha! Excellent thread.
I haven't got a story that is that extreme, but the Skoda example does show that cars can sometimes benefit from being used hard -- although the poor thing does sound rather abused.
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Marlot, that really is shocking :-( What car was it? I think we should be told!
Edited by Billy Whizz on 11/02/2008 at 12:07
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When my 02 Focus went back to the lease company at 3yrs/100k (immaculate save for a few stone chips, and having never run more than 100 miles late for a service), I took on another Focus TDDi from a departing employee, which had 6 months left on its lease. The reason was that the Megane Tourer was coming on to the list in a few months, I wanted to hold out for one of those instead of the 307 HDi I was being offered, and this Focus was "going spare".
I picked it up with 52,000 miles showing. Opened the service book, and it was blank. Called the lease company and the reaction of the phone operator was "oh my goodness! ". The poor thing had never been serviced in its life. It had been in for brake pads and tyres, and that was it!
Pulled out the dipstick and there was about 5mm of black goop registering on the bottom. After a discussion with the fleet manager to absolve myself of any responsibility for a future engine failure, and a trip via a petrol station to buy a couple of litres of oil, I drove it 200 miles home. It felt a little laggy, but pulled OK and seemed to run fine.
Had it serviced two days later, and then put 12,000 miles on it in the next 6 months with no problems at all. It felt fit as a fiddle after the service, although I wouldn't have wanted to own it with 100,000 miles+ on the clock.
As a direct result of that, the company introduced a £250 fine for any company car driver who allowed their car to run more than a month or 1,000 miles overdue for a service, unless they had written authorisation from a company director. Quite right too.
Cheers
DP
Edited by Webmaster on 11/02/2008 at 23:13
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Colleague of mine mislaid the oil filler cap of his company Vetra and had the bright idea of covering the hole with a plastic bag. Of, course the engine ingested the bag and ruined the engine.
Another colleague carried a large tin of paint back from B&Q in the footwell of his company Orion. The can tipped over on a roundabout and split most of its contents all over the inside of the car.
Edited by Round The Bend on 11/02/2008 at 12:28
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We had a car for years at our company that was always giving us problems-we finally sent it for sale(to the trade) and thought that it was the last we had seen of it!To our suprise,it re-appeared on the car-park in front of our building-one of our employees had bought it.
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Another colleague carried a large tin of paint back from B&Q...
One of my staff did similar with a can of cresosote in the back of a 4-month old (leased) Renault Laguna - and our fleet was self-insured so I had to decide how much the employee should pay and how much the company should pay - I seem to recall the car needed nearly £2000 of replacement trim.
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One of ours had a fully undersealed boot-he wnt round a corner a little too fast with a can of underseal in the boot-at least he had the sense to get a brush and spread it out evenly.
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What car was it?
It was at a previous company, so now almost 7 years ago. A silver Ford - An escort or focus petrol I think, and it was company owned (not leased). It became a disciplinary matter but I was told (by both the employee and the subsequent driver) that the car still drove fairly well!
The car was about 18 months to 2 years old at the time so still may be out there!
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Anyone want to lay claim to the most pampered or abused company car and beat the above examples?
Many years ago my then boss had a Cavalier 2.0 CDi and then a Rover 827. He never serviced either of them and basically ran them into the ground. (If they got 1 oil change in their life I'd be surprised) He even carried builders rubble in the boot of his 827.
Both managed to do over 120,000 miles. He got rid of the Cavalier I think around 1991 --- and I saw it in being driven in Brighton in 2002 (I presume it had had a new engine by then!).
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At my girlfriends last company they had a pool car that was not abused but was neglected; it used to sit for weeks at a time undriven in the car park. It was a red Celica, 04-plate IIRC and my g.f. used to borrow it for 1 day per month to drive from Nottingham to Bristol.
The rear brake disks were badly rusted and rumbled all the time, I used to take it out and do a series of emergency stops in it to try and wear the rust off before she did the long journey in it.
The paintwork was in a state, it may never have been washed and was covered in tree sap and algae. Moss was starting to grow in the rear runners under the tailgate.
I told her to tell the company about the brakes on several occasions but they didn't do anything about it. I only filled the washer bottle up for her, cant remember whether I ever checked the oil and I dont suppose anyone else did.
I wonder if they got rid of it before it went for its first MoT..
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I have to say I don't treat my company car very well.
I do a lot of long motorway driving and with snacks etc there might be quite a bit of rubbish in there! I do try and clean the inside every couple of weeks or so but I have been known to leave it far longer. Outside I largely ignore in winter (I'm one of these with a black number plate) as it just gets dirty again but I do keep it nice in the summer. There's a jet wash by my office so use that every week or so.
Also I coach kids football so there can be lots of mud / sand (from the astroturf) in there too.
It gets a full valet every few months which is its saving grace!
Re mechanics I don't really check the oil very often - just when I feel inclined to. I was religious about this in my previous (personal) car but don't see the point quite so much any more. Currently driving around with a cracked windscreen that I haven't had time to do anything about (rarely in the same place for long enough for a fitter to come out!) though having a replacement tyre this afternoon due to a screw that I've picked up.
I am good on service schedules though. It's been done more or less exactly on time (and always early rather than late) from new, having another one this Friday which will be a couple of hundred miles under the 36k. I can easily do 1000 miles some weeks so hard to time it right if the garage is booked up (which they usually are if you want a courtesy car).
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"cracked windscreen that I haven't had time to do anything about (rarely in the same place for long enough for a fitter to come out!)"
Get it sorted. Had a hire car with a small crack and one day it got a LOT bigger going over a hump. They will come to your home you know. I usually get tyres swapped at home now to avoid waiting :-) Or maybe your company/lease-company will not allow this?
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A Celica for a Pool car? I wished I worked there!
With all the H & S rules these days I would have thought most companies would have taken the maintenance of company cars very seriously.......but I remember years ago all users of our Pool car had to present their driving licenses after it was discovered that somebody was using it who'd never passed a driving test!
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A Celica for a Pool car? I wished I worked there!
Years ago my mate left school and got a job with a firm of Chartered Surveyors who had a pair of black 205 Gtis as pool cars. There was me still doing A-levels and my mate would turn up at lunchtime in a 6 month old 205 Gti!
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Some years ago I bought a Mondeo Mk2 1.8 diesel estate from a company I was working for at the time. It was only 18 months old at the time but had covered 75k miles as a rep's car. I had always thought that it looked well cared for as it was always shiny and clean in the car park. I approached the boss and asked him to let me know when he wanted to sell it. One day he mentioned that it was due to go and very generously said I could have it for £3000. Bargain done, I picked it up the following week only to discover to my horror that it had never once been in a garage for any reason ! I know I should have checked, but made the huge mistake of assuming that it would have been kept maintained. However, given the price I was delighted having very swiftly arranged a service to get another 100k out of it with no problems at all. It was pampered during its time with me but survived its deprived childhood with honour. I subsequently sold it locally and I still see it floating about these parts to this day. It still looks as if it is in good order.
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had covered 75k miles as a rep's car.
snipto my horror that it had never once been in a garage for any reason
I am amazed the cambelt held out that long.
A mate used to run an Escort TD (same engine) which was one of a fleet of 15 bought (outright) for their field engineers. Not one was ever serviced and all were immobilised with cambelt failure between 50 and 60k
You would have thought the idiots would have had two or three go, seen a pattern forming, and had the others in for a change for the £150 per car it would have cost with a group booking. But no, they let every single one of them snap, and spent £1,000-£2,000 per car replacing entire sections of engine.
Cheers
DP
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I was given a 1yr old 30K miles Ford Orion when I started one job that had previously been mainly mainly driven by another sales guy.
It was *instantly* (like on the very first roundabout at the exit of the industrial estate where the company was based) obvious that there was something seriously wrong with the car. Turned out it still had its transit blocks in the suspension! It was exactly like driving a go-cart, and someone had thrashed around for a year in it.
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In the mid-sixties I spent a day somewhere in the industrial North (as it then still was) with a local rep of the tobacco manufacturer I was working for at the time. His car was a series 2 or 3 Vauxhall Victor, the ugly cylindrical one with ridges along the wing and roofline on both sides. Got a feeling it still had a 3-speed gearbox too.
Anyway the rep, a perfectly nice but depressed, crumpled and overweight character a lot older than me, was far from mechanically sympathetic and should really have had an auto. He would get the car barely moving, bang it into second for about a second and then straight into top. As a result the car, not all that old, suffered from clutch judder and quite severe driveline vibration and its engine spent a lot of time labouring and pinking. Most of its mileage consisted of short juddering pootles from one CTN outlet to the next, and there were a lot of them. I am a courteous and kind-hearted person but had a hard time keeping shtum. I kept wanting to shout: 'No! No! Not yet!'
I wouldn't have wanted to be that car's next owner.
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When we lived in the country we had a neighbour who would start his car from cold, and immediately hold it at maximum revs for about 2 minutes. He claimed that "anyone knows that its running when cold which wears out the engine, so he got it warm as quickly as possible".
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My wife's aunt, an academic old enough never to have taken a driving test, used to do the same thing, warming her car up at high revs on full choke from stone cold. I did my best to explain to her why this was a bad thing to do, more times than I can remember. Each time she would appear to understand, thank me politely and next morning be heard torturing the poor jalopy again.
Don't say I said this, but stupidity alone doesn't explain all the problems in the world. Stubbornness is just as harmful, if not more so. And it is a central characteristic of Englishwomen.
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but had covered 75k miles as a rep's car. I had always thought that it...
week only to discover to my horror that it had never once been in a garage for any reason ! I know I should have checked but made the huge
... and there's still plenty of people about that say that no car will ever run unless the oil is changed every 6000 miles.
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Depends on your definition of abuse. I always used to see how my company cars fared on the Beggar's Roost trials hill -- all loose stones and mud if raining -- which was still and maybe still is public highway. Most fun was a Talbot Sunbeam made out of very lightweight steel but the rear-drive escorts went very well. Friend's Marina was a pig on the hill but went nicely round Oulton Park. Well you don't want to risk your own wheels; do you.
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Used to have a Laguna 2.0 Petrol many years ago. Hated the damn thing and by the third year of it's 4 year lease I did everything I could to break the wretched car in the hope that the leaseco would terminate it early.
Started from cold, I used to immediately floor it in neutral and let the engine bounce off the rev limiter for a short while. I'd block change down from 5th to 2nd when coming off the motorway slip road at about 70 and watch the rev counter needle go off the scale past 8,000 rpm. And guess what...... the only thing that broke on the damn car was the needle on the rev-counter which fell off!
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I used to work with a colleague who from time to time would buy one of the company cars, an occasional privilege extended to senior staff. This chap used to put them in the local paper and take a tidy profit in the process. He had a buyer who phoned his wife to come and see it and so rushed back to meet the buyer at the appointed time, apparently the potential buyer wanted the car for his wife. he arrived to find the bonnet up with potential buyer peering in - only to find it was the divisional director who quickly put 2 and 2 together!
MGs
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I treated the car (my own) to its two yearly valet on Saturday - found a DVD last used on holiday nearly two years ago and previously lost car parking receipts totalling about £60, which I can now get back on expenses.
Result!
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"previously lost car parking receipts totalling about £60, which I can now get back on expenses"
I hope the receipts are recent. If it's like our policy then out of date receipts/claims will not be paid. Mainly because they cannot be reclaimed from a project/customer.
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I have a 'thing' about ink pens and bought a Lamy 2000 (an interesting modern design from the 1950s I think). I lost it after a few weeks; couldn't find it anywhere. So I bought a second and lost that after few weeks. I have never lost any nice pens before ever. So I bought a third and this time I knew where I lost it - in my car, but I couldn't find it, despite a thorough search.
Took the car in for a mini valet a few weeks ago and the monosyllabic Slovak cleaning the car simply picked it off the carpet and handed it to me. Result! -I even still have it four weeks later.
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WhoopWhoop, hope you're not one of those who moans about Renault reliability!!
Edited by Round The Bend on 12/02/2008 at 07:46
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My Mk1 Cavalier estate B74 WUW with 120K on it had clutch failure on the way to a distant sales meeting the day I was due to go on holiday abroad. Mysteriously, although the clutch had been slipping since I got the car at 95K, it failed completely only a few miles from home. Yes, I'm afraid I did it in but I considered my sales figures meant I didn't need to attend the meeting.
Company and hire cars are specially built to take punishment anyway ...
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With my company vehicles I tend to look after them if I like them and they were my choice or abuse if they were forced on me or I hate it.Just to show a point to those who rule over me maybee. It does annoy me slightly if a car I loathe gets washed when in for a service by a well meaning garage.
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Bought a 2 year old Volvo 740GL in 1991, 90K miles, direct from lease.
Service print out and service book showed every service within 100 miles of required mileage. Car was immaculate; spare unused, interior unmarked; it had to be one of the most cherished company cars I have ever seen.
Problems? a miss-fire between 1500 - 2000 rpm was cured by replacing the neoprene seals on the injectors (done under warranty). In the next 60K miles, I replaced the clutch, water pump, 1 handbrake cable, 1 set of front pads and the rear silencer. I did all my own servicing using genuine parts, and estimate that it cost me a total of £300 in those 60K miles
That was the only car I have ever regretted selling. I reckon if I had kept it, it would still be going strong. (it might be, for all I know! - person who bought it after me put a non-dated reg. on it, and it doesn't show up under the original reg.
Edited by drivewell on 12/02/2008 at 11:18
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This abuse/running sweet as nut scenario is frustrating. I look after and maintain all of my cars company or not to 'near-aircraft' standards. But it is true that a lot of thrashed, trashed and abused pool cars do seem to run very well indeed. Years ago, I bougt a 6 month old CVH engined 1.4 Escort. The place I was working in at the time had an identical car as a pool car. This car was driven by everyone, deliberately abused, filthy, and never checked over. However the engine ran much more smoothly and sweetly than my car ever did.
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Back in the late 80's Dad was forced into a company car. Convinced him to get an MG Montego (either that or Cavalier or Sierra which neither of us really liked). Picked first one up in April '89 (F reg). Although he looked after the car, it was stolen on a trip to harrogate, used in an armed hold up. The Police managed to stop it by placing a van in its way. Thieves drove into the van, writing the car off. Was replaced with a nice shiny G reg one, which was stolen nearly a year to the day later. Was found in the less salubrious parts of Bristol, wheels missing with damaged panels and cigarette burns in the upholstery.
Whilst waiting for it to be returned, he had a Sierra 1.6L. As I was insured to drive his company cars, I borrowed it one Sunday, only to have a stationary Citroen BX pull out straight into it.
On top of this, when I worked as a retail manager, our district managers had Cavaliers. This was changed to Passats in '98. One of the district managers decided he wanted one, so had to kill his Cavalier. Went racing round the industrial park where distribution centre was, bumping it straight over the mini roundabouts with the rev counter bouncing off the limiter. Dont think he managed to trash it though.
Whilst in the same company, the regional director was given the boot. Before handing his E Class merc back, according to company gossip he let his kids loose with crayons and flet tips in the interior. Parked it up and told the firm where to collect it from.
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"only to have a stationary Citroen BX pull out straight into it."
You mean you drove into a stationary car??
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Ah, no, BX was parked up in a layby, and decided to move off whilst I was going past the layby, and drove straight into the front wing of the car. Completely destroyed front n/s wheel and suspension, and sent me heading for a lampost. Managed to control car, and parked up perfectly in the gateway to a field nearby.
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I am sure it is only a story that has grown through telling, but when the large Retailer I used to work for was taken over by a (then) smaller retailer who made many of the staff redundant, the story was that they spent weeks tracking down all the company cars which were at peoples houses, train stations etc. The staff were so cheesed off with the way they were treated they just posted the keys back and told them to collect the car themselves.
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Had a (new) Volvo S40 that had just about everything wrong with it - most moving parts were replaced (clutch after only 3 weeks, drive shafts), electrics faulty, rust on the roof, sunroofs (3) leaked (first was replaced the day after delivery!), window motors seized, brakes seized. Got so bad that I seemed to use the service manager's T5 most of the time, and Volvo supplied me with 5 litre cans of oil every two weeks to keep it topped up (I only did 50,000 miles in 3 years).
When the lease ended, I left a full breakdown of all the faults that had occurred (5 pages!) in the glove box, a copy under the rear seats, another in the spare wheel well.
Yet externally and internally the car was immaculate - mostly because the Volvo dealers had to keep valeting it because they also left oil stains or scratches on the paintwork when it was in for its fortnightly repair.
Needless to say, never had a Volvo since, and the leasing company has now dropped Volvos from our list!
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A mate of mine blew up the engine within 10 000 miles from new on a 2 litre Volvo S40. Screwed it mercilessly to within an inch of its life so it was perhaps not a major surprise when it went.
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When the lease ended I left a full breakdown of all the faults that had occurred (5 pages!) in the glove box a copy under the rear seats another in the spare wheel well.
Well done sir!
I have never had a company car in my life so rely on finding a decent specimen after you cc drivers have discarded them after 4yrs or so. Your depreciation is my conservation.
Please look after them, and hide the record somewhere the garage won't check e.g flat under boot trim, pollen/air filter box, fuse box, under battery....etc. Think of it as an arranged marriage, even Skodas can be loved. Both company and car will probably last longer than Jaguar or Rover [my 9yr old A6 is basically a Skoda Superb]
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