No white elephants
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HOW DID you choose your last new or used vehicle? Competitive purchase price? Or what is known fashionably as brand loyalty — buying a make which you have always bought? Ease of maintenance? Known reliability? Generous warranty? Or perhaps your wife liked the colour of the upholstery...
I fear that not all coaches are purchased as a result of rational decision making. Of course, in extreme cases some logic is used. I'm sure nobody lays out £35,000 for an additional vehicle to cover a new school contract; here something from your friendly local dealer's bargain basement will suffice.
There's a lot to be said for sticking to a reliable model when you've found one which suits you. Your staff — both drivers and fitters — will know the machines they're working with. Your spares stock can be kept down since you have only to cover one model. If every coach is different you are faced with the choice of investing a lot of money on spares — or of risking having a coach idle because you don't have to spare part you need and your local dealer doesn't have it either.
Of course, the cheapest coach isn't always the best buy. You need to take account of what is becoming known as total life cost. If you buy a new coach and plan to keep it for three years, you should consider the model's known failings — particularly those likely to crop up while the coach is still in your fleet — and the cost of rectifying them.
What will its resale value be in three years' time? Inflation makes a mockery of much of your financial planning but current trends can indicate which chassis and bodies hold their value and which don't.
The first question any buyer of a used coach asks is the ex piry date of the Certificate of Fitness. You'll also want to check just how good the dealer's guarantee is, and, Particularly if you're buying a really cheap vehicle, whether or not the dealer will actually look at it before you take delivery of it.
And don't — please don't ever — buy a vehicle without examining it. Yes, you may not believe it, but I swear I've known operators part with cash for a coach which they haven't seen, relying solely on the vendor's glowing description. There's no surer way of heading for trouble, So far I've been thinking mainly of chassis . . . what of bodies? To a lesser extent, what's true of chassis is true of bodies. Have a variety and you need a variety of spares; however, your investment in body spares is negligible — unless you have particularly inept drivers!
Some operators like to patronise different coachbuilders each year so that their new coaches can be seen to be different. A laudable aim, although I doubt if most cus
tomers really notice. While you and I can identify a coach body at a distance of half a mile, I'm sure your customers see them as I see Japanese cars — they all look the same apart from the colour.
Enough of my prejudices. Having decided on your chassis and body, there are other things to think about. Seating, for example, a necessary feature of any coach. Seats must look inviting and be comfortable. The fewer seats you fit into a coach of any given length, the more comfort you offer your passengers (in theory at least). However, the more seats you fit, the more your coach can earn.
The standard 49-seat 11 metre coach represents a happy compromise between comfort and profit. But if you do a lot of long-distance work you might choose to fit, say, 45 recliners.
Which raises another complication only too familiar to operators with a few coaches with odd seating capacities. A 49-seater can cover a hire booked for a 45-seater but not the reverse. And when you're short of a coach for any reason, you'll always have a 49-seat job to cover and a 45-seat coach available . .
Allied to seating is luggage accommodation. On a longdistance summer holiday hire, you can bet all your passengers will turn up with outsize suitcases. One advantage of rear-engined integral coaches is vast underfloor luggage space.
Sadly, British coach operators just aren't interested in rear engines. They offer passengers a quieter ride, they are easily accessible. for maintenance — OK, so some of them needed to be easily accessible for maintenance, but that's no reason for dismissing the whole concept of rear-engined coaches. Back to luggage, anc minicoach operators will recog nise a subject dear to theii hearts. Where do you put 1 F. suitcases? A loaded roof ra.cl does nothing for your centre 01 gravity or your fuel consump tion. Frankly, I'm surprised thai there has been no pressure frorr operators to legalise the towinc of trailers by psv minibuses After all, if non-psv can tow E trailer, why not psv too?
Minibuses have only a smal part to play (no pun intended!) ir most operators' fleets. For theil size they are comparatively ex. pensive. Few can offer rea coach comfort (or even car corn. fort) for really long trips. And, w. we all know, although they only carry 25 per cent of the load of big coach you can't pay thE driver only 25 per cent of hi$. normal wages.
No doubt a few readers — including the makers 01 minicoaches — will disagreE with me, but even with thE relaxation of drivers' hours regulations for small vehicles, reckon they're just not worth thE trouble, unless you have SOME specific use for them.
Be sure you can accornmo date any vehicle you buy. Will E 1 2-metre coach fit over your pit Can you wash the top deck of E double-decker? (Not everybody thinks of that one!)
Will a high-floor coach fit intc all parts of your depot? If thE answer to that question is "Yes except for the corner near thE tores where the roof is low— rest assured that some idiot wil try to park it there, no matte what instructions you issue tc the contrary , In the end, there is a certair amount of subjective judgmen in all coach purchases. But tak( care that today's colourful Jum bocruiser isn't tomorrow's whit( elephant.