1DayLater - The Blog

Carpooling - Considering “Mileage Per Person” rather than Miles Per Gallon

Last week we summarized 5 tips to help you track mileage and improve your cars Miles Per Gallon (MPG), but what about other options? If you’re environmentally conscious then maybe Carpooling could be a great alternative to driving everywhere on your own.

Considering the environment

Here’s some interesting food for thought. According to WorldBank (World Development Indicators), there were at least 462 passenger cars for every 1000 people in the UK in 2008 (and a similar amount for the USA). In Monoco it was as high as 732 cars per 1000 people - that’s almost 1 car per person!

No doubt this figure has risen considerably in the past 3 years, but that’s certainly enough to make me stop and think about my own car use.

Start Carpooling

Carpooling (aka car-sharing, lift-sharing, ride-sharing and covoiturage), is the sharing of car journeys so that more than one person travels in a car.

The idea is that, if you’re driving somewhere and have some spare seats in your car, then why not let others travel with you. On the flipside, you might want to find a lift with someone driving your way.

Any tools to help me get started?

One great website which we’ve found is CarShare. It’s free to sign up and shows you (in map view) any Carshare journeys happening in your area.  

There’s also a pretty detailed help section which should alleviate some of those worries you might have after watching slasher-films like The Hitcher ;-)

Of course if CarShare seems a bit daunting, you could always look at setting up your own CarShare with workmates. Not only will you be saving yourself some money, but you’ll be doing your bit for the environment too. Just don’t forget to get everyone to chip in for petrol!

5 things you can do before driving to improve your mileage efficiency

Here are some practical tips which can help you save mileage before you even set foot in your car.

• Plan your route well - Take a look at Viamente, a great web-based software which can help you plan routes with multiple destinations - http://www.viamente.com

• Lighten your load - Carrying an extra 100 pounds of weight can increase your fuel consumption by 1-2%. This is especially important if you stop and go often. Light cars also perform better for mileage, something to consider when you are buying a new one! 

• Properly inflate your tyres - Keep your tyres fully inflated as much as possible as this can reduce fuel consumption by up to 3%. Most tyres lose about 1 PSI per month, so checking your tyres monthly at the garage isn’t a bad idea.

• Use synthetic oil - Using synthetic oil in your car can help you save around 5% gas on average

• Figure out your cars optimum speed - Different types of cars perform better at different speeds - this is usually around 50mph. Your cars optimum speed is the minimum speed your car is running at in its highest gear

Next week - 10 things you can do during driving to improve your mileage!

Is HMRC cracking down on people who submit fraudulent claims? Can people really get away with it anyway?

There has been some talk online recently that UK tax body, HMRC are cracking down on fraudulent mileage claims. I tried to find a decent independent source to confirm this but I’m having no luck so far - I’ll update this blog once I do.

It’s fair to say though, that fraudulent mileage claims represent a real problem for HMRC (and for large companies). Mileage Auditing firm; The Miles Consultancy said that in a recent survey of their company database, 25% of employees admitted to giving fraudulent mileage claims.

Now I imagine that once upon a time, people could probably get away with sneakily bumping up their mileage claims for the taxman. However now that we all live in a world of software and automation…I reckon that we are all just blips on a bell curve somewhere…waiting to be analysed!

Thinking back to what I remember about statistics from school, I would hazard a guess that when all of our data gets pulled together by the powers that be, it looks a little something like this graph.

Now I just couldn’t resist a bit of random statistics (non maths-nerds - close your eyes for this bit)

When you have a normally distributed graph like the one shown above, the majority of the population (around 99%) lies within 2 standard deviations of that average centre line. Oooh I remembered some of my school lessons! The gist being that an HMRC statistician could easily identify any people on these extremities!

So, if you’re a taxi driver or a haulage person, your average will be way over to the right hand side as you drive further than most people each week. But of course HMRC will know all of this as they have data from millions of people in all sorts of different professions….

It’s the guys on the far right hand side who the tax office will have their watchful eyes on of course. If you’re over on the left then you’re not claiming enough and should be using mile tracking software; 1DayLater to track your business miles!

Anyway, so the short answer to the question “Can I get away with submitting fraudulent expense claims” = no (in my opinion) shouldn’t be scared of real eyes watching them in this day and age, it’s the statistical eyes that they need to be afraid of!