There are plenty who seem to, but you do work long hours, and you have to be prepared for long journeys, and be really good at planning, because the BCA planners couldn’t plan a piss-up in a brewery! They will plan a drop-off and then a pick-up in what seem to be fairly close postcodes, but they could easily be 30-40 miles apart, in an area with bugger-all public transport, like, say, Cornwall, or Scotland. And if there are sudden issues, like a problem with a car, or an owner not being available when you arrive to do an inspection/pickup, getting hold of Non-conformance can a good way of finding out just how patient you can be.
I worked for BCA for about two years, but as an agency driver, and I really enjoyed it, I drove a lot of different vehicles, I saw more of the country of my birth than I ever had before, and when I wasn’t driving, I was in the back of the team car asleep!
But that ended when BCA had a new bloke come on board who didn’t like using agency drivers, and we were all shut down. They still have agency teams now and again, and the place I work now, which is a company I used to drop cars into and pick up from, I still see drivers who I know from when I was plating.
There are plenty of drivers who’ve been doing it a long time, but a good proportion are retired or semi-retired, and aren’t too fussed about having to earn enough to support a family.
I reckon I drove somewhere north of 100,000 miles, I could be doing three or four pickups in Cornwall a week, with maybe three cars a day, my carryovers from say Helston or St Austell would involve a 230 mile drive home, then another 150-160 miles the following morning to deliver it, or maybe 70 miles down to Bridgwater, back to Bristol, back down to Bridgwater, then down to Cornwall!
You do get to drive a huge range of vehicles, from the sublime to the bloody awful!
A lot of what I drove were Motability cars, which can be dirty, smelly and quite badly treated, but there are all sorts of leased vehicles from private homes, commercial properties, and can range from tip-back commercials, vans, through most cars up to quite high-end; I drove an ambulance from Bristol to Newport once, I picked up a ten month old Maserati Ghibli in Cornwall, drove it home then up to Bruntingthorpe the next morning, I guess about 370 miles. I drove Jags, most Audis, up to a Q7, Range Rover Sport, Mercedes C63 AMG, and probably an example of most cars from most manufacturers available in the U.K.
Which I still do, but for a company that repairs, refurbishes and stores cars from Motability and Enterprise.
Like most jobs, it has its upsides and it’s downsides, and it can be frustrating, but there are plenty of drivers, male and female, who seem to manage pretty well, I keep seeing them regularly at work, including the two drivers who were my team leaders when I was driving, and I started three and a half years ago, they’ve been doing it a lot longer.
Hope that’s been of some help. 😁
