Author Archives: Van Rental

Electric Bin Van Powered By Its Own Garbage!

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kirklees-electric-vanHuddersfield-based Kirklees Council has just become the organisation to run a van powered by the waste it collects!

The van, a Smith Electric Vehicles Ford Transit, is completely electric and is being used to collect garbage from a number of rubbish bins in the Huddersfield town centre area.

This rubbish is then taken to the council’s Energy from Waste plant at Emerald Street, Huddersfield, where it is converted into electricity.

The electricity generated by the Emerald Street EfW plant is then used to charge the electric van overnight – completing the circle and creating a zero emission vehicle.

New Van News – Ford & Kia Introduce New Models

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Ford Transit Connect Hits US Shores

Ford has been promising the Transit Connect van to the US market for some time. It looks like that time has now come.

The Transit Connect will go on sale in the US this summer with a starting price of around $21,000. It will have an optional second row of seats and extra windows, making it a viable people carrier as well as a useful small van. Needless to say, it will be powered by a petrol engine with an automatic gearbox, rather than the manual diesels favoured on this side of the Atlantic.

Ford has also confirmed that the Transit Connect will form the basis for Ford’s promised electric van, due to market in 2010. This seems likely to be based on Smith Electric Vehicles’ existing Transit Connect model, the Ampere.

For full details and photos, click here for the AutoblogGreen report.

Kia Introduces 4×4 Sorento Van Model

A rather more surprising vehicle introduction is the new van from Kia. Known for its good value cars and people carriers, the Sorento SUV has now been converted into a 4×4 van!

The Kia Sorento XE-C is still identifiably a 4WD passenger vehicle but has been modified to remove the rear seats and provide a reasonably large load area.

One downside is that it still retains passenger-style rear doors – which are not a patch on van-style sliding doors when it comes to accessibility. That said, it’s a niche vehicle for a niche market and should benefit from Kia’s usual competitive prices and reliable build quality.

You can read an early review of the Sorento XE-C here, in the Scotsman.

Job Losses and Short Time For UK Van Factories

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Falling van sales across Europe mean that the UK’s two largest van factories are cutting back on manpower.

Ford has taken the difficult decision to cut 500 jobs at its Southampton factory. The plant, which makes the Transit van, as recently moved from running a double day shift to a single day shift, but as I reported here the company’s original intention was to manage this transition by cutting working hours, rather than jobs. Perhaps this was always a little too optimistic…

Ford are struggling with falling global sales – last year, the Southampton factory only produced 66,000 Transits – against almost 75,000 in 2007. This year’s total may be even lower – with export markets all over Europe suffering a downturn.

Vauxhall are also experiencing falling demand for their hugely-popular Vivaro van. Workers at the GM plant in Luton, where the vans are made, have had their working hours cut from 38 to 34 hours per week, although no job losses have been announced as yet.

Snow Driving – Essential Tips

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Driving in the snow is not something that most of us have much experience at.

Here are a few tips for anyone renting a van in the next few days who may need to drive in the snow:

  • Take it easy – steer, accelerate and brake much more gently and slowly than usual
  • You may need up to 10 times your normal braking distance to come to a safe halt
  • Drive in the lowest gear possible – if you set off in 1st gear, shift up to 2nd as soon as you are moving
  • If you start to skid, take your foot off the brake/accelerator and steer gently into the skid – don’t brake or accelerate hard to try and drive out of it
  • Make sure you have plenty of fuel, warm clothes and perhaps a drink and sugary snack with you. You may get stuck, break down or have to take a long diversion and the cold is your enemy in these cases.
  • Remember that if you break down you should get out of your vehicle to wait for assistance – you will need a warm coat.
  • Make sure all of your windows are cleared of condensation, ice and snow before you set off. Allow plenty of time so you won’t feel tempted to try and rush.
  • Make sure your windscreen washer bottle if full and has plenty of anti-freeze in it
  • The compacted snow in other vehicle’s tyre tracks is more likely to be icy – fresh snow often gives better grip
  • Put a shovel in your van if you have one – it will enable you to clear the snow from around your wheels if you get stuck.

Take care out there – most collisions are preventable and are the result of driving errors, even in this bad weather.

For the latest traffic information, visit the Highways Agency Traffic Information website.

Van Hire in Dublin & Cork

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easyVan at Silverstone with StelioseasyVan has just opened three new branches in Ireland – in Dublin and Cork.

easyVan is one of the most popular and fast growing van rental businesses in the UK. Its van hire broker business has proved remarkably successful, taking advantage of Northgate and other rental companies’ established branch networks to build a retail-focused, 160-branch van hire offering.

easyVan has now expanded further with two new branches in Dublin and Cork. The move into the Republic of Ireland means that easyVan’s reliable and affordable service is now available outside the UK.

The two new locations are:

  • Dublin: 38, Rosemount Business Park, Ballycoolin
  • Cork: Advance Pitstop, Little Island and Advance Pitstop, Togher Industrial Estate

We’re working on a way of expanding our van hire directory to include Ireland as well as the UK – until that happens, you can get quotes for these new locations by going directly to easyVan’s website.

Update: We’ve now added both Dublin and Cork to our van hire locations database. You can find branches in the Dublin and Cork area by searching for van hire at those locations or you can visit the location pages for these cities:

More New Van Deals

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Hot on the heels of Renault’s recent National Van Week, two more major van manufacturers have launched new van marketing programs to try and entice small business customers to buy new vans.

Peugeot has launched its own ‘Van Week’ – running from 2nd-8th February. According to April Harris, Peugeot’s UK LCV Product Manager, “Van Week is the ideal opportunity for our customers to take a look at the award winning Peugeot LCV line-up.”

Peugeot’s line up of vans includes the award-winning Bipper, which has been awarded both the What Van? ‘Van of the Year’ title and the International Van of the Year 2009 titles. It’s a city-sized van that is designed to make light work of tight city environments while retaining an impressive payload and loadspace.

Volkswagen, meanwhile, is offering new van customers 3-year, fixed-price service plans on all van models, including the Transporter-based Caravelle and California models. The deals start from just £295 and are available until 31st March, 2009.

Any retail or business customer* purchasing a new van before 31st March 2009 is eligible for the deals and there are a choice of mileage bands, ranging from 45,000 to 90,000.

*maximum fleet size of 25

Staffordshire Fire Service Finds Sprinters Highly Effective

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The last year has seen several fire and rescue services around the UK take delivery of specially-equipped Mercedes Sprinter vans.

My local fire station (in North Yorkshire) has one, and Staffordshire Fire & Rescue service has recently taken delivery of two further Targeted Response Vehicles (TRV), as they are known.

Mercedes Sprinter TRV
Mercedes Sprinter TRV

The vehicles carry 800 litres of water and are specially equipped to deal with small fires such as grass and bin fires.

According to Staffordshire Fire & Rescue Service Chief Fire Officer Peter Dartford, the TRVs have been extremely successful at dealing with such incidents. “Unfortunately a large proportion of fires we attend to now are small, deliberately started fires – this new vehicle has been purposely designed to deal with these types of incidents, particularly as it can get to areas where a normal fire appliance wouldn’t be able to access.”

These latest two vehicles were ordered following the success of Staffordshire’s first TRV, based at Stoke-on-Trent which dealt with 346 incidents during its first six months in service, in 2007. This freed up larger, traditional fire appliances to attend more serious incidents and improved the fire service’s ability to access difficult or remote locations.

Update: Avon Fire & Rescue Service are also using Mercedes Sprinters – but in a completely different way, creating smaller conventional fire appliances from crew-cabbed Sprinter chassis with custom-built bodies. Click here for the full story.

Advertising on vanrental.co.uk Delivers Results

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If you are a small business owner, it’s sometimes hard to decide where to spend your advertising pennies. Take van hire, for example.

The Yellow Pages is a traditional advertising channel  – as are local newspaper and radio advertising.

The problem with these methods is that neither of them delivers customers in buying mode directly to your website.

Advertising on vanrental.co.uk does exactly that. Here’s what one customer recently told me:

“…we get very good response from the Euro ad. Keep up the good work.”
Admiral Self Drive Van Hire, Walsall

Our website has been carefully designed to produce geographically-targeted results – so people searching for van hire in your town will be shown a list of van hire companies in their area.

Our van hire search facility allows users to specify their location and a search radius – for example, they can request a list of all van hire companies within a 10 mile radius of their home town.

Getting listed in our directory enables you to benefit from these visitors – visitors who are in buying mode and are ready to book a rental van. In 2008 (our first complete year), we had more than 225,000 visitors and generated more than £205,000 of van rental sales for the companies in our directory.

Do You Do Something Different?

We also have web pages dedicated to specialist van hire – such as European van hire, one-way van hire to Spain and van hire for bands – so if your company offers something different to everybody else, get in touch and shout about it!

We are always happy to create new pages to support specific services offered by our advertisers, if we don’t already cover them somewhere on our site.

If you would like to learn more about advertising on vanrental.co.uk, take a look at our advertising page or get in touch today. I look forward to hearing from you.

London Brentford Van Hire: Practical Car & Van Rental

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Practical Car & Van Rental BrentfordI’m very pleased to welcome Practical Car & Van Rental of Brentford to the vanrental.co.uk directory.

Practical Brentford is based just off Commerce Road, in Brentford, and offers a full range of hire vehicles for customers:

  • Small vans (e.g. Vauxhall Combo)
  • Short, medium and long wheelbase panel vans (e.g. Ford Transit, Mercedes Sprinter)
  • Luton vans with tail lifts
  • 15 & 17 seat minibuses

In addition to these commercial vehicles, Practical Brentford also offers most popular sizes of hire cars.

The company serves the Brentford, Chiswick, Ealing & Hammersmith areas of London and can collect passengers from Brentford bus and railway stations.

To learn more about Practical Car & Van Rental Brentford or for details of rental rates and a quote, click here to visit the Practical website.

If you’d like to see your van hire company listed on vanrental.co.uk, click here for details of our advertising options.