Business Car Manager: Editor’s Blog

I ALWAYS like talking to Mark Sinclair – he’s the boss of Alphabet leasing company.

Mark invariably has an interesting take on the world of business cars. Occasionally we meet up – as was the case late last year for lunch – and just shoot the breeze.

At the time Mark was particularly keen to talk about the new BMW MINI Partnership for small businesses, and the new BMW 320d EfficientDynamics, the first details of which had just been launched. (Although Alphabet is a multimarque leasing company, it is owned by BMW, and Alphabet will be helping small business users through its BMW Finance arm and the BMW MINI Partnership.)

Another topic was the ‘contract hire must be right for everyone’ method of thinking for financing your business cars. Now, while I do think contract hire is a good way to fund a business car, it’s certainly not the only financing method for business cars. And every small business should do what’s right for them and their business.

On Friday I had a look at Mark’s blog on the Alphabet site. In this case he was discussing LPG. LPG has some fairly good enviornmental benefits but its chief attraction is the low cost of fuel – half the price of diesel and petrol. You can read Mark’s blog here: Return of the prodigaL(PG).

I was interested because I’ve just been doing some research on LPG, the cost of conversions and how far you had to drive before you would recoup your money. On some of the big-engined premium models it makes a lot of sense – fancy a big-engined Mercedes? Or a Range Rover? LPG might be the way to run one of these without requiring your own personal filling station and private bank.