A considerable number of the country’s largest companies expect the business lease car to become less and less relevant, even after corona. The lease fleet is already shrinking and that is expected to continue.
Working from home has been the motto for over a year due to the pandemic and large companies are still making some use of this. It is expected that working from home will partly continue, even though it will probably soon be possible to go to the office all together again. From research of News hour among the twenty largest employers in the Netherlands, it appears that the majority of them expect to go from normally four to five office days to two to three. A logical consequence is that a business lease car is therefore less relevant.
Companies such as ABN AMRO, KPN, De Volksbank, KPMG, Unilever and ASML were asked about their lease policy and expectations for the near future. Most of these companies indicate that their employees with a business lease car traveled an average of around or just over 30,000 km per year and this is now dropping to around or slightly above 20,000 km. Many employees will drive too few kilometers to keep a lease car attractive.
The reduced attractiveness applies to both the employer and the employee. Insurers ASR and CZ, for example, state that some of their employees are expected to want to stop leasing themselves, because the benefits will decrease and the costs will remain the same. In many cases, the minimum mileage criterion for a lease car will no longer be met by employees. As a result, the right to a lease car expires.
It is still difficult to say what decline this will mean across the board for business lease cars in the Netherlands. However, there is no doubt that the business lease car is on its way out. Last year, the Association of Business Drivers (VZR) estimated that from 2020 the number of business kilometers would decrease by 20 percent. As a result, VZR was already expecting a shrinkage of the business lease car fleet. Some of the by News hour The surveyed companies say they are looking for alternatives in the form of, for example, shared cars or (financial) support for other forms of mobility.