Newslink January 2022

Comment
Flicking the switch to electric may be a
move that puts some off driving for life
Rod Came
MSA GB South East
I am writing this just before Christmas,
and as I have not been blessed with the
foresight that the DVSA imagines all
ADIs have when deciding when their
clients should apply for a practical L-test,
I have absolutely no idea what the driver
training industry will be struggling
against by the time you read this at the
start of January.
As a forlorn hope I will wish you all a
prosperous New Year. Don’t despair, it
may yet turn out to be so; if it is it will be
a triumph of hope over expectation.
Now that it is the new year and any
resolutions made have been dispatched
to the rubbish bin it is time to plan
ahead. For example you could initiate an
advertising campaign to attract more
clients. Oh, I forgot, all ADIs are up to
their neck in work – but perhaps now is
the time to spend a bit of money on
promotion, rather than leave it until
business starts to falter.
You might start looking ahead to try
and guess when you will be having to
invest in an electric tuition vehicle, or
you could just ignore that approaching
tsunami and bury your head in the sand.
At some point in the near future the
demand for manual tuition will reduce as
that for electric automatic increases. For
each ADI the crossover point will be
different, but almost certainly such a
change for your clients cannot be
introduced overnight.
I speak from experience in that having
provided manual tuition for many years I
noticed that there was an increasing
number of enquiries for automatic
tuition. There had been an ADI in town
with an automatic car but he was no
longer teaching, so I thought I would give
it a go. I bought an older auto and
gradually increased the number of clients
learning in it and eventually phased out
the manual tuition.
That worked out OK because my
investment in the auto was not great.
The problem is the opposite is now true,
in that electric cars are very expensive
and used ones are generally not suitable
as they have a limited range because of
reducing battery life.
The usual change to a new car is
seamless, be it the end of the lease or
part-exchanging the old car for a new
one, but it won’t work like that when
electric become more popular. It will be
necessary to have two tuition cars, a
manual to finish off the training of the
current clients and a very expensive
electric car to take on the new ones.
Some ADIs will continue teaching in a
manual car as there will still be a
diminishing demand; manual tuition will
always be required by some but almost
certainly it will eventually become a
niche market, with the majority turning
to electric automatic tuition.
There will always be a demand for
driver training (self-driving cars are a long
way off) but there will be a lesser
demand for several reasons. The main
one is that the price of lessons in an
electric car will have to be much higher
than at present because of the cost of
the vehicle. In addition, the higher cost
of an electric car will dissuade some
from ever learning to drive as they will
think they’ll never be able to afford a car
themselves due to the same high initial
cost.
Those two factors alone will reduce the
client base before you take into
consideration such things as pay-permile
charges, congestion charges,
parking charges, public electricity
charges for those with no off-street
parking, a ban on any form of fossil fuel
car/van entering city/town centres ... the
list goes on.
If you are getting a new car this year
and intend to keep it for three years, now
is the time to start planning ahead.
The Vauxhall Mokka-e: The petrol
and diesel versions are popular
with ADIs looking for a practical
car for family life away from
driving lessons, but will the
£31,000+ price tag for the
electric model – some £10k
higher than the base petrol model
– make it a non-starter?
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NEWSLINK n JANUARY 2022