Engineering Team Achieves 14-Minute Average Booking-to-Drive Time
A local civil engineering firm needed rapid vehicle access for unscheduled structural inspections. By onboarding 17 field consultants onto our app, they bypassed office rental bookings and now access vehicles in minutes.
Mersey Quay Design is an engineering firm based near the Brunswick Docks in Liverpool. They needed a fast way to get 17 field consultants to structural site inspections without keeping high-cost pool cars. We helped them move from paper vehicle logs to a system where engineers book, access, and drive our electric vehicles in 14 minutes on average.
The challenge
The firm previously kept two diesel hatchbacks parked outside their office on Sefton Street. When emergency inspections popped up—like a retaining wall issue near Birkenhead in October 2024—engineers spent up to 1.8 hours dealing with keys, fuel receipts, and physical logbooks. If both cars were out, team members had to book standard rental vehicles, which meant waiting for delivery or taking a taxi to a depot.
This administration structure cost the team roughly £420 per month in lost billable hours. Because their work relies on rapid response times, waiting hours for a vehicle meant projects were delayed. Honestly, the old setup was slow, and their engineers hated dealing with the manual expense reports that followed every single trip.
They needed a flexible setup that allowed staff to leave the office instantly. Managing fuel receipts for 47 monthly trips became a full-time headache for their office manager, Sarah. The business wanted to eliminate the traditional rental desk experience entirely while shifting to electric transport to meet local carbon targets.
Our approach
We started by auditing the firm's typical travel patterns over a 30-day period. Our team mapped out their frequent destinations, which mostly clustered around the Wirral Peninsula and North Liverpool. We verified that our fleet of Audi e-tron and Tesla vehicles parked in central Liverpool was always within a 7-minute walk of their key staff.
We onboarded all 17 engineers onto our app during a single lunch-and-learn session on Thursday, 12th September 2024. This process involved checking driving licences digitally and setting up their corporate billing profiles. (By the way, we handle all the DVLA checks on our end so clients don't have to fiddle with share codes.)
Instead of assigning fixed cars to individuals, we showed them how to book based on proximity. We set up custom billing rules so that every trip was automatically charged to the correct project code, eliminating manual expense claims.
The solution
Our app now handles the entire driving experience for the engineering team. Every engineer has a digital profile on their phone, which acts as the physical car key. They walk up to any of our Liverpool-based electric vehicles, Unlock with your phone, and drive away immediately.
The fleet is maintained with 99.3% battery, 99.8% electric. This means no one has to stop at a petrol station on the way to a site visit or worry about clean air zone charges in central cities. We manage the charging, cleaning, and maintenance, which means there are absolutely no desks, no paperwork for their staff.
Administrators track every mile in the app. At the end of each month, the firm receives one clean invoice split by project code. This has replaced the bundle of paper receipts with a single, clear digital statement that takes less than 10 minutes to review.
Results
Since moving to our fleet in September 2024, Mersey Quay Design has completely removed manual travel administration. Engineers now get to site inspections in a fraction of the time, and the business has reduced its travel-related carbon footprint. The monthly administration time for travel expenses dropped from 2.4 days to zero.
Timeline
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12 Sept 2024Onboarded 17 engineers during a single 45-minute training session.
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Oct 2024Logged 52 emergency site visits with zero manual expense claims.
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Nov 2024Reduced average vehicle access time to 14 minutes.
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Dec 2024Saved 18.5 hours of travel admin for the finance team.
"I was sceptical because our engineers are picky about vehicles and we've had bad experiences with digital keys before. Onboarding took about 5 days longer than we planned to verify everyone's details, but now the team just unlocks with their phone and goes. No desks, no paperwork. We saved £340 in admin costs in our first month."