Round the clock electric service
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by a special correspondent
SOME POTENTIAL users of battery-electric vehicles may be deterred from using them because they see specialised maintenance as a problem, and in any case, a battery-electric is not the sort of vehicle which can easily be hurried to some distant agent for attention.
Eliminating such problems is the task of companies like Oxford Electrics, of Abingdon Road, Oxford, which runs six fully-equipped mobile service vans and employs a team of specialists who can do major roadside repairs as well as operating a time-saving scheduled maintenance system.
The service operates over a 60-mile radius, or greater in special cases, and each of the vans carries about £1,500worth of spares ; there is a further 00,000-worth of components at the Towles Mill base.
Carrying so many spares as a routine has proved a frequent time-saver — it is common for a van on scheduled servicing to be called to a breakdown before the day is over.
The majority of local dairies employ Oxford Electric's for regular servicing of their fleets. Two engineers are engaged mainly on servicing and a further four on breakdown work but they are all trained to undertake both types of work whether electrical or mechanical. One of them is an electronics expert, who usually attends jobs that look like being particularly complex.
The company is authorised to perform annual testing of electrics, and this is done for customers who do their own servicing as well as those whose fleets are serviced by the company.
Emergency turnout
Breakdowns and servicing provide about an equal number of jobs, the breakdowns running typically at five or six a day but sometimes as many as 30 — some of them real emergencies. On the day that I visited the company a call came through from a local dairy for urgent assistance : one of its Smith's-NCB dairy electrics had broken a halfshaft on a steep roadway and couldn't be towed for fear of damaging the differential beyound repair.
Within a few minutes I was accompanying service engineer John Bushby to the dairy to get more details and within an hour he had reached the vehicle and started work on it. The job turned out to entail replacement of the differential (the teeth of which had been damaged — it was later re conditioned in the workshops), both half-shafts and all the brake shoes. Working at high pressure, John Bushby completed the work within three hours — by which time the police had arrived to cone off the stranded vehicle as it was on a dangerous bend.
Calling at the dairy on the way back to base, to do six urgent servicing jobs, John again had to work against the clock. I was told by the manager, Mr Harry Thc that the broken down eh would have been out of mission for days had it been for the mobile emerg service — and the speed of the repair obviously a lot to the fact that a SE half-shaft and a differ( were among the spares red. Similarly, the six sE abs at the depot were ieted in an hour because variety of parts carried a van.
company carries depot 3 for the leading makes ttery-electric, though it is Lri distributor for Cromplectricars, at does the Oxford Elecservice cast? Well, the any will not quote a ard mileage charge, but that travelling time and ge charges depend in part xtv much scope there is number of visits to be worked into the day's work for an engineer and his van. But I was told of the figures that went into a quotation for a maintenance and breakdown service for a 100 vehicle operator having five main depots and a number of smaller depots at from four miles to 30 miles from Oxford. The cost per vehicle per week averaged E3.
This charge covered a routine service taking about an hour every two months ; the cost of replacing fast-moving parts, excluding batteries and tyres but including brake linings and so on ; and a number of breakdown calls. The inclusion of spares replacement in the charge was based on an examination of fleet records for the preceding year.
asked whether a user could in some cases profitably do his own routine maintenance or contract with a garage to do it for him, Mr Carter, of Oxford Electrics, mentioned the example of a two-vehicle operator who had developed the necessary knowhow to do the servicing job efficiently himself and had cut his cost, but he called in Oxford Electrics for major repairs and breakdowns. Contracting routine work to a garage could, he felt, be advantageous if a fitter had the required expertise, but if the garage were more than a few miles away the vehicle downtime, discharge of the battery and loss of driver availability would more than offset the saving, in a typical case.
There is also the point that the company has developed from being solely a service specialist into body building for electrics and some other specialised vehicles (such as pigeon carriers) and there is always a bodybuilder available for outside repair work.