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PUTTING ON A FINNISH FINISH
Page 84
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by CM reporter
ATTRACTING passengers to bus and coach travel means not only comfortable and good-looking vehicles but clean ones too. In Finland recently — home of two well-known makes of automatic washer — I discovered how important clean vehicles are seen to be, in a country whose winter road conditions make pristine appearance difficult to maintain.
The 96-vehicle fleet of Onni Vilkas, based at Kotka, Finland's biggest port, about 100 miles east of Helsinki, has a Finnmatic Streamline washing machine of the type familiar in Britain.
The Vilkas fleet is all single-deck, mostly locally-bodied Scanias, and the company is convinced that clean buses attract passengers. I was told that a rival operator on a long-distance route to a town on the other side of the country used not to paint.his vehicles at all. However, after a number of years the Vilkas fleet was shown to be attracting 30 to 40 per cent more passengers on the same route and the rival company not only paints its buses now but gets Vilkas to wash them when they arrive at Kotkal It is common practice for the wash to be used free of charge by visiting vehicles — a helpful attitude that I cannot quite see happening in the UK.
According to Finnmatic, the Streamline machine is economically viable in fleets •with more than 50 or 60 vehicles. Smaller operators are advised to buy the next model down in the range, known as the Strong. This is a washer which moves up and down the vehicle on a fixed site. Cost in the UK is about £6,000 installed. Though designed for a small operator the Strong is in fact used by some large ones too. The Stockholm municipal fleet, for example, has chosen it in preference to the Streamline because the six minutes to takes to wash a vehicle is exactly the time that it takes two women to clean the interior. Thus vehicles are cleaned round the clock inside and out without any waste of staff time.
The Vilkas fleet in Finland is effectively split in two, with about half of the vehicles employed on town services in Kotka and based in the depot where the Streamline is installed. The rest of the fleet is based in a small town about 10 miles away and is used on longdistance work and for tours and so on. At that depot there is no automatic machine and cleaning is carried out by the more traditional method of two women with mops and buckets. The company is now studying the possibility of installing a washing machine at that depot.
I was surprised to find, given the lengthy periods of low temperature, that the Vilkas machine at Kotka was not equipped with the optional drying attachment. Although this can cost up to £5,000, one would have thought that use of the wash must be restricted in the winter by the dangers of freezing. Apparently, however, on many days during the winter the temperature rises above freezing for an hour or two in the middle of the day when the wash can be used and warm water is sometimes used as well
Driver responsibility
Every driver in the fleet is responsible for keeping his particular vehicle clean. This means that vehicles can be washed as many as three times a day, although in summer th,is may' be necessary only once a fortnight. Drivers with dirty buses are reprimanded.
The Streamline machine used by Vilkas is housed in a large garage and vehicles can be driven through at the rate of one every minute or minute and a half. The Streamline machine — which sells in double-deck form in the UK for about f 1 0,000 installed — has brushes for side, front and back of the vehicle. The roof is dealt with by a high-pressure spray although an additional brush is available as an option. Under normal washing conditions the machine operated by Vilkas uses only water. This means that on a typical wash the only cost is for the electricity necessary to activate the electric motors for the brushes and the price of water. Water is metered in Finland — something which is already talked of for Britain — and costs about Bp per cum. On a typical wash the cost for water is about 10p.
For one or two days a month the machine is filled with detergent as well, to ensure that all the deep-seated dirt is removed. The garage supervisor ensures during that period that all of the vehicles at the main depot use the machine. At the same time a separate waxing arch is used to give a better external finish. Though it is difficult to quantify an exact price for an individual wash giving this "de
luxe" finish, it is thought to be less than £1 per vehicle.
The Vilkas Streamline machine has been operating for about 18 months and is expected to have a life of around 10 years. The fleet engineer told me that the machine had not caused any damage other than when vehicles have been driven through it too quickly.
The Strong version works by a system of effect relays which allow many different types and sizes of vehicles to be accommodated. Essentially a small sensor detects the shape of the vehicle and adjusts the travel of the brushes accordingly. On this machine there is a roof brush. Once again, to get the best out of the machine, it needs to be properly sited. On the installation I saw — belonging to the other city operator in Kotka — vehicles could approach it from only one direction, which obviously cut down the flow. The operator concerned had only 25 vehicles so perhaps this was not particularly important.
Taking in the washing
Like the Streamline, the Strong is available with a number of optional extras like a dryer, provision for degreasing and the use of a highpressure sequence. The Finnmatic company is apparently selling quite a number of Strong machines to relatively small operators who then proceed to clean not only their own vehicles but those of other fleets.
The company has recently introduced a cheaper version of the Strong known as the Sprite — for 30-vehicle and less operators — which costs about 40 per cent less and has about half the life but works on a similar principle. The smallest model in the range is the Smart which is essentially a car washer though it could handle mini buses and small vans too.
For the small operator it may be all too easy to reject bus washers as too expensive. However many operators might well get something of a shock if they costed out how much each vehicle cost to clean by the traditional method of a bucket and brush. While in the early days of automatic machines, stories of damage to vehicles were commonplace, most of these problems seem to have been overcome these days providing the brushes are kept clean.