SK Rent-a-Car Says 84% of Companies Operating Corporate Vehicles Are Willing to Switch Providers; Plans Tailored Consulting

[Financial News] More than eight out of 10 companies operating corporate vehicles were found to be willing to switch providers when their contracts expire. In response, SK Rent-a-Car plans to launch a consulting-based mobility business that directly assesses each company’s vehicle operations and recommends tailored products and services.
On the 4th, SK Rent-a-Car released the results of a survey conducted with business networking service Remember & Company on corporate-vehicle operations at 465 companies in South Korea. According to SK Rent-a-Car, 84% of companies using rental cars or leases said they were willing to move to another provider after their contracts ended.
Only 7.5% of respondents ranked “low rental fees” as the top consideration when choosing a service, the lowest figure among all options. By contrast, 85.6% said work efficiency would improve by more than 10% if they adopted an integrated management service that handled vehicle management and administrative tasks together. This suggests that the scope of operations and management, rather than price, is becoming the key factor in service selection.
Some 75.4% of respondents spent at least three hours a month on paperwork such as compiling driving logs and reconciling receipts. Seventy percent of the employees handling these tasks were at the level of deputy department manager or higher. Nevertheless, only 22.6% said they clearly distinguished and verified the public and private use of vehicles.
As many as 64.8% said vehicle problems had disrupted their work schedules within the past year. In particular, 72% of sales personnel said they had personally visited and waited at a repair shop for maintenance. Among companies that directly purchase and operate their vehicles, more respondents cited wasted internal staff resources (38.9%) as the biggest source of loss than depreciation (30.5%). The share reporting work disruptions caused by vehicle problems was also 75.9%, well above the overall average.
Based on these findings, SK Rent-a-Car plans to visit companies, assess their vehicle operations, and recommend tailored products according to the results.
For companies facing a heavy administrative workload, SK Rent-a-Car recommends Smartlink, a comprehensive vehicle-management solution. A dedicated device installed in each vehicle collects driving data in real time, automatically creates driving logs, and converts them into National Tax Service (NTS) forms. Companies can also manage the distinction between public and private use based on measured data rather than estimates. For those that find document checks or penalty-fine inquiries cumbersome, SK Rent-a-Car will introduce document-search and penalty-fine and traffic-fine inquiry functions through Smartcare Biz, a corporate-only app.
If maintenance waiting times are a problem, companies can use on-site maintenance, in which specialists visit the client’s premises. Even in a blind survey that evaluated services solely by function without revealing brands, on-site maintenance ranked among the leading options at 58.5%. For companies with a high risk of accidents, such as those operating sales vehicles, SK Rent-a-Car recommends one-stop accident handling covering everything from claim intake to repairs and replacement vehicles. In the survey, one-stop accident repair services and emergency on-site charging for electric vehicles also received high response rates, at 64.1% and 62.6%, respectively. Companies operating electric vehicles can use emergency charging services dispatched to the site when a battery runs out, as well as 24-hour roadside assistance for flat tires or insufficient fuel.
For companies that want to own vehicles as assets, SK Rent-a-Car offers new-car long-term rentals, which allow them to choose between purchasing and returning the vehicle when the contract ends. For those seeking to reduce upfront costs, it presents used-car long-term rentals as an alternative.
An SK Rent-a-Car representative said, “A significant portion of the costs generated by corporate vehicles arises outside the quotation, not within it. In reality, companies often find it difficult even to determine the scale of those costs internally. Drawing on 38 years of vehicle-management expertise accumulated since 1988 and the industry’s broadest range of products, we will continue to propose vehicle-operation methods tailored to each customer.”
Smartlink is a comprehensive vehicle-management solution independently developed by SK Rent-a-Car in 2016. Through dedicated devices, it collects and analyzes more than 10,000 types of driving data in real time, providing services that improve the efficiency of large-scale corporate-vehicle operations, including vehicle monitoring and car sharing.
[email protected] Dong-chan Kim Reporter