“A lot of our customers are looking to do business with people who are net carbon neutral,” Philip Browne, MD of Autorola Australia, tells Fleet Auto News’ Caroline Falls in this podcast. Browne talks about soaring used car prices, the group’s lean marketing practices of used fleet vehicles, and how they helped the online auctioneer go carbon neutral.
“It’s all about being lean, and, and looking at processes to eliminate wasteful, expensive processes and move everything to an online environment ,” said Browne.
A key point of difference between Autorola and competitors is that Autorola doesn’t have a central site for storing and selling used vehicles. It only shifts vehicles from the seller to the buyer, eliminating costs and carbon emissions associated with moving vehicles to an auction site.
“We know that you can hold most of the cars that get sold by fleets in Australia, you can hold them at their point of origin,” said Browne.
“What of course has given us a huge kick along in the last couple of years has been the COVID situation. Because of COVID all the physical auctions were closed, and they all moved to an online environment. But of course, they did retain their existing functions of taking all the cars to their own sites, which is what we don’t do.”
A company called Impact Sustainability conducted an audit of Autorola Australia’s emissions last year — looking at the company’s fleet, its offices, its electricity usage, energy sources and business travel, including flights.
“They came back to us with the size of our footprint. We then evaluated the sorts of people that we might like to offset that footprint with and after looking at a number of the offset providers, we chose Greenfleet Australia Proprietary Limited. We chose them because they are very much a local operator and we were very keen to make sure that what we were contributing money to was happening here in Australia. So we started talking to them late 2021. And we officially became net carbon neutral in early March this year 2022.”
Browne had a bit to say about used vehicle prices too.
“I’ve been in this game now for 35 years and I’ve never seen used car prices as strong as they are,” said Browne.
“The situation as we see it at the moment, is that late model, particularly low kilometre cars, are continuing to increase in value. And it depends a little bit on the make and model as to how strong that is. You mentioned before the hybrid’s in huge demand, and they are both new and used. Hybrid it’s very hard to get hold of. If there’s one area that is perhaps not moving as quickly it is the older cars. If we talk about plateauing, they may have plateaued.”
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