Data driven fleet tyre selection: What fleets need to know in “The Evolving Tyre Landscape”
At the end of October i247 published a white paper highlighting what fleets need to know in “The Evolving Tyre Landscape”. Tyres & Accessories got in touch with i247 Group director of Tyres, David Legg, and learnt how his company deploys a data-driven approach to tyre selection.
Our conversation started with an introduction to the i247 Group. The i247 Group has an established background in the tyre industry. But for a lot of the time it’s been in the background. The business was founded by John Mason, its chairman and owner, who was originally involved in setting up Fit4fleet and Fleet Tyre Network (FTN). While he subsequently exited those businesses, Mason always maintained a presence in the fleet world. For its part, i247 has continued to do outsourcing work for major fleet companies for the last 35 years. That means giving well-known key customers such as Leaseplan access to a panel of tyre fitters and empowering them to choose the best – all with one point of invoicing, one point of billing and one point of reporting.
“So, if you need rapid response for some of your fleets… utility fleets, last minute drop fleets, VIP cars – [that’s] all different types of vehicle purchases – [you] probably need a slightly different journey when it comes to tyres”, David Legg explained, continuing:
“By picking the right person in that panel, it gives tyre fitters the opportunity to put their best foot forward without having to take a risk for the things that are not their core products, which traditionally they had to do.”
According to Legg, the model has “worked really well over the last 6-8 years” and the business has “come out from kind of behind the scenes in the last couple of years, as the panel has grown”.
Further complications brought on by the combination of factors such as the pandemic and evolving technologies like electric vehicles mean there is even more call for the kind of service i247 offers: “We’ve seen quite a lot of confusion and a lot of change happening in the last couple of years…so that was the reason we put the White Paper together, to try and spark conversation – trying to use some of our insight that we’ve gained with some of our customers to spark a wider debate to get everybody talking.”
Such an approach contrasts with examples of “traditional” previous business practice where some leasing companies tried to use their size and scale as a “hammer with which to drive the pricing down in the marketplace.”
However, “things are changing in the tyre marketplace. We’ve managed to convince a lot of leasecos that the cost of service is of vital importance…if we don’t support the tyre industry, it might not always be there for the fleet users to use.”
And as a result, some fleets, “especially in recent tenders,” have stepped away from what you might call such old-school, price-first models.
What’s an EV tyre?
Electric vehicles numbers are rising all the time, but a quick look at vehicle parc data reveals that fleets are home to even higher proportions of electric vehicles. That raises the question: what exactly is an EV tyre? i247 acknowledges that there’s still debate relating to what constitutes an EV tyre.
“There’s lots of different voices – some shouting quite loudly” and “different press…with no real substance behind it”. In order to fill the information void, over the last 5-6 years i247 have decided to make their tyre selection processes “more data driven”.
“We have the opportunity of insights from data. We’ve kind of kept on the side [up till now] because we always presumed that the early adoption [trends] would go on to form the early data and that that would probably be slightly misleading”, Legg explained, adding:
“We felt that the original concept of an EV was basically ‘let’s convert some cars…[and] see what happens while we build up and design and develop a true EV. We’re now we’re seeing those true EV’s come through.” And that means “better mileage on tyres”. Meanwhile, most tyre manufacturers are now saying their tyres are compatible. However, even though most tyres are marketed as EV compatible, some drivers who have bought into the EV concept are really worried about their mileage.
“We’ve managed to convince a lot of leasecos that the cost of service is of vital importance…if we don’t support the tyre industry, it might not always be there for the fleet users to use…” – i247 Group director of Tyres, David Legg
At the same time, “The noise levels of their vehicles have a bigger voice now than probably an ICE (internal combustion engine) vehicle did 5-6 years ago…So leasing companies are more willing to listen and let drivers people have like-for-like in their fleet cars.”
That not only contrasts with previous fleet tyre sales practice, but also traditional tyre retail. “In the retail world, you can go and buy whatever you like for your car. It’s your car. You own it. You take it on whatever journey you want to do, you can decide what to do with it. However, in the fleet, a lot of the contracts are outsourced or contracted out or the leasing companies have a set policy. And they will be using their volumes to get different rebates.”
“Some of the Japanese and the Far East brands are premium, they’re on OE now. Hankook is doing a great job with their…EV tyres and also Falken and Bridgestone. What wouldn’t be conceived as a premium? Bear in mind, I’m not saying what isn’t a premium here. That’s dangerous in the tyre world
“So if a driver wants a Falken for his vehicle because it’s come out on a Falken, why shouldn’t you have one even if your policy might be Goodyear or Dunlop?
“There was lots of noise in the early days [of EVs] about very low mileages…and some of that was justified…but if you go back in the history of ICE vehicles there’s been a lot of vehicles that only manage ten, 15,000 miles on a set of front tyres…But that’s exactly the same as some homologations on the top-end ICE vehicles…If someone has put the research and development into a tyre that’s meant to be on Mercedes and it’s now been homologated to Mercedes with MO on it. Why wouldn’t you want that?
“Most fleets have adopted a probably a more lenient approach of probably 70 to 80 per cent policy fit and around 30 per cent of what the driver wants, cause they’ve listened to the EV argument…”
Data points to performance over price
With i247’s data-driven approach in mind, one really interesting question is: what are the best tyres? “…if you take the whole life of [a hypothetical] fleet and you pick the price point versus the contract price point, there’s a huge difference…actually the premium brands come out better because over six years you would get less tyres”, but “on a different vehicle, another brand might come out better…we can sit there and go ‘your sprinters do best on brand A, but your Connects do best on brand B. And here’s your data, your journeys. Here’s what you do.”
Meanwhile “[tyre manufacturers are] quite happy now with the data to actually prove where they are best and what they do best…But at the moment, I think there’s a lot of people still going with gut feeling or what they’ve been told…”
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