Car use and APs

[Millarkie]

We provide a car for our AP to use during the week (entirely for social trips, no need to use it for 'work'). This is mainly because we live in a village and the nearest shops/cafes are 5 minutes drive away (although there are hourly buses and half-hourly trains to bigger towns). At the moment we have an agreement that if they want to take a trip more than 50 miles then the AP should contribute towards the petrol cost. This worked well for first au pair but latest au pair is doing a few 40-odd mile trips per week which is really adding up for fuel costs and wear/tear on car. She is mainly going to our nearest city which is 20 mins and £4 return on the train.
With a new au pair arriving in a couple of months I was thinking of re-phrasing our car use agreement and was wondering what other au pair hosts offer in terms of car use?

Depends on how good an Au pair they are! If they turn out to be worth their weight in gold then being generous makes for happy APs.

Check out her driving skills first, then say first 50 miles per week you will pay,any more she pays. Then get more generous if she proves herself.

What about not letting her have a car at all but buying her a travel card instead.

There's no real reason why she can't use public transport is there, if you do have buses and trains every 30 minutes. Blimey, if I lived where you lived, even I wouldn't bother with a car

No such thing as travelcards out here The buses are run by lots of different companies so no bus card either. Could get a season ticket for the train but that would be limited to journeys to the city and back which would limit her social life (and current AP goes to the gym in local town daily and that is bus link not train).
Ho hum.

DH is thinking we should say that we will pay for fuel for first 50 miles of the week, so that will cover a trip to the city, and 3 trips into the local town (or 5 trips to town and a trip to the big cinema) each week. Downside on that is that I'll have to keep recording the mileage.

Kidowner - I do know what you mean and our last AP would have come into that category. This one is OK but not fabulous and the mileage thing is only one example of where she pushes the rule to the extreme.

What about working out how many miles the car does to a tank of petrol? So, if your car did 250 miles on one full tank you would fill the tank once a month and any extra petrol needed in between would be down to the aupair.

Good idea, but the problem with that one is that the AP does not have sole use of the car ie. I use it to pop to shops/go to gym twice a week and we prefer to use it if we are taking a trip at weekends (it's a 6 seater so more room for kids/dog etc). (I always tell the AP that they can use the car during the week daytime but need to negotiate for evenings and weekends although tbh I 've never said No if they have wanted to use the car then).
Dh has been thinking that we might get a car solely for au pair use (mainly because the current car is high powered and so not easy/cheap to insure for APs) - if we did that I would probably do the 'we pay for one tank a month' thing.

Pay for her busfare sometimes?

I spoke to our current AP about the bus service once - she was flabbergasted that it was once an hour and 'like, you'd have to know that you wanted to go to town, like, an hour before!' (she has really picked up English well )
Well, I've had to send out an aupair duty list to next au pair so I've ended up with a woolly statement saying that if she does a long trip or if she is regularly travelling more than 60 miles a week we may ask her to contribute to petrol costs..that gives us a bit of discretion.

It's probably worth getting a car for AP's sole use - if you get somethink like a C1 or a 107 you'll save massively on the insurance, she becomes responsible for petrol etc and you don't have the problem of negotiating who uses the car. Plus a 6 seater is pretty big for an AP if she doesn't need it for work.

However, you may also find that just saying you're going to record the mileage may make her more careful. Or get her to record the mileage and spot-check occasionally.

It would make you very attractive to potential APs!

We're looking into the sole use car option - the 6 seater car was bought as a nanny car, when we had a nanny who brought her own child to work so needed to fit in 3 child seats into the work car. It is really useful for long trips and holidays though so wouldn't want to get rid of it.

why not get your AP a little scooter. the vespa type with a helmet. You could pay for 1 - 2 lessons when they arrive but they're easy to use and cheap to run. Fill it up and say the rest is up to her and set a limit on how far she can go in it. If your local town is 5 mins away she could go there and say for bigger towns she has to get the bus/train from there. You could even get one of the new green ones and you don't have to pay road tax

Am about the same distance from the nearest big town/city (same one isn't it?). AP has sole use of small car (Fiesta) and I just take the hit for local journies which include the two/or three trips into the City. However, with just a small car the costs aren't unbearable.