In focus
Drive Fuze E
stablished just over a year ago, Drive Fuze is aiming to succeed in the world of car subscription services – an industry which has seen plenty of promise, and also some high-profile setbacks. Having started out by offering its own subscription fleet to customers, Drive Fuze is now progressing to what its founders always saw as the main target for expansion – offering ‘subscription-as-a-service’ for clients such as car manufacturers, dealers, and leasing and rental companies. As COO James Birch explains, his confidence in the need for this sort of product comes from personal experience, through his previous role as managing director of leasing company Leasys, where he wanted a solution, not just for new cars entering the market, but also to potentially retain vehicles once they had completed their initial lease.
Below: Looking at other providers offering subscription, Drive Fuse believes it is one of the only true cradle-to-grave management solutions.
He says: “I’d been looking for a subscription provider for the three years that I was there, because this forms a part of not just people getting into new vehicles, but second and third tenure of vehicles as well, and I used to have vehicles which might have been more attractive to put out on a secondary lease or
In the sometimes turbulent world of car subscription, Drive Fuze is hoping first-hand experience can give it a crucial advantage. Sean Keywood finds out more from COO James Birch and CTO Richard Baker.
rental rather than put through to the auction or whatever it might be.
“Looking at the providers out there, there were tech solutions where you could list the vehicles, but there wasn’t really anyone with the capability to take it from cradle to grave in terms of what happens when a vehicle has an accident, has a cracked windscreen, all of these things, because there is at the end of the day a vehicle behind this whole process that requires management, moving, servicing, maintaining, as well as the system development.” Birch explains that Drive Fuze’s own subscription fleet – which currently has around 500-600 vehicles, and is growing – was mainly developed in order to prove to potential clients that it can provide the sort of holistic service that Birch himself was previously looking for.
He says: “It’s never our intention to have the world’s biggest subscription fleet. Our fleet is just to prove concept and to test all of those scenarios so that when we go to our subscription as a service [clients] we’ve been there, done it, tested it on our own fleet, worked with all those different [management] scenarios and back-end processes, and I just think it gives us a lot more credibility than coming out with a sort of whizzy tech platform front-end without the back-end knowledge.” CTO Richard Baker adds: “We know when we go to an organisation and talk about subscription- as-a-service, we won’t just be saying ‘Here’s how we list a vehicle’, we’ll be talking to them in depth about [topics such as] how you process a fine, or if a customer calls in and wants to change a start date for a subscription, how we do that and re-sign a contract digitally.
“I think our wide product mix puts us in a good position. We’re not just focusing on EVs.”
26 | March 2024 |
www.businesscar.co.uk
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32 |
Page 33 |
Page 34 |
Page 35 |
Page 36 |
Page 37 |
Page 38 |
Page 39 |
Page 40 |
Page 41 |
Page 42 |
Page 43 |
Page 44 |
Page 45 |
Page 46 |
Page 47 |
Page 48 |
Page 49 |
Page 50 |
Page 51 |
Page 52 |
Page 53
