Office on wheels: Sanofi's car fleet keeps 7,700 sales reps safe and moving

When the office has wheels, safety and sustainability drive everything.

Road accidents are among the leading causes of occupational injury globally, and field sales representatives drive up to 30,000 kilometers a year. Sanofi's global fleet program treats the company car not as a workplace perk but as the workplace itself, and invests accordingly.

Robson Bueno has driven for Sanofi for 27 years, in at least seven company cars, through the traffic of Curitiba, a southern Brazilian city that hasn't kept pace with the growth in cars on its roads. By 6:30 on a working morning, the field sales representative has already dropped his daughter off at school. Now he climbs into his car, fastens his seatbelt, and begins the day's first visits. "It is very comfortable," Robson says. "You feel safe and supported."

That sense of support is not accidental. For Sanofi's 7,700 field sales representatives, spread across 51 countries and visiting hospitals, clinics, and pharmacies every working day, the company car is the office, where they spend three to five hours each day. Managing that across wildly different roads, cultures, and regulations is the work of a global fleet program covering more than 12,000 vehicles.

"Our sales fleet is the face of Sanofi on the streets," says Rafael Vidal Hein Magalhaes, Global Head of Car Fleet Operations, based in São Paulo. The program sits within Sanofi's broader Workplace Experience strategy, built on a principle of equity: a sales rep on the road deserves the same standard of workplace as a colleague at headquarters, designed for very different conditions.

The road to 2030 begins here

Sanofi's Planet Care strategy sets out a roadmap toward carbon neutrality by 2030, and the sales fleet, which accounts for close to 10% of the company's direct greenhouse gas emissions, is central. Today, 50% of the global fleet meets Sanofi's Ecofleet criteria: electric, plug-in hybrid, hybrid, and biofuel vehicles. The target is 80% by 2030.

The path varies by market. Battery electric leads in Europe; hybrids lead in Japan and the United States; in Latin America and parts of Africa, biofuel and hybrid options are the realistic near-term step. "We cannot just put an electric vehicle everywhere and say we have a green fleet," Rafael says. "We need to understand each scenario." Annual driver satisfaction surveys, now extended across all international markets, shape practical improvements, including a QR code recently added to keychains in several markets that gives instant access to emergency contacts after drivers said they couldn't always remember who to call when something went wrong.

Sanofi's fleet will keep getting greener, strategically, in a way that respects drivers' needs and the specific conditions of each country.

For Robson, now in his 28th year on the road, the cumulative effect – vehicle, training, support, policy – is simple to articulate. His car will be replaced in around 15,000 kilometers' time by something newer and safer.

The professional driver most reps don't know they are

Frank Zarifian spent the first half of his Sanofi career on the commercial side. When the Health, Safety and Environment (HSE) team, the function tasked with protecting employees from workplace risks, asked him to help reach the sales force on road safety, the scale of the problem surprised him.

"Sales reps don't consider themselves professional drivers," says Frank, now HSE Business Partner for Sanofi's admin and sales population, based in Paris. "They are sales representatives, medical representatives. But they cover 25,000 to 30,000 kilometers every year. That exposes them to road risk much more than any other employee."

The early numbers are sobering. Around 2010, Sanofi recorded up to 180 road accident injuries in a single year, and there were fatalities. In 2025, the figure stood at 14 injury-causing accidents. Accounting for a smaller field force, the frequency of serious road incidents has fallen by a factor of six.

The data offers a further insight. When Sanofi ran its Sales Champions program, recognizing the top 1% of performers, a pattern emerged: the best salespeople and the safest drivers tended to be the same people.

What the car says before you do

Few countries take the car as seriously as Italy does, and few people understand that better than Gianluca Cariolo, Population Health Strategy Head at Sanofi, now 24 years into his career, he has spent much of it managing field sales teams. In a nation that gave the world Fiat, Lamborghini, and Alfa Romeo, the company car carries weight beyond transportation.

"It's like a status symbol," smiles Gianluca, who manages a team of six sales reps. When a rep pulls into a hospital parking lot, the vehicle signals to competing companies exactly where they work. That visibility also extends to recruitment.

His teams currently favor hybrids over fully electric vehicles. With reps routinely covering more than 250 kilometers a day across large territories, fully electric driving requires charging stops that eat into working hours, and plug-in hybrids tend to lose their fuel-efficiency advantage over those distances. Sanofi's fleet strategy is calibrated to those realities, choosing the right technology for each market rather than applying a single global rule.

Every road, every condition

Marius Feraru manages Sanofi's Romanian fleet, where sales reps drive four to five hours a day across motorways, country roads, and unpaved tracks, in temperatures swinging from over 40 degrees in summer to minus 20 in winter. Romania's 75 to 80 sales vehicles are chosen with safety first and comfort close behind, with environmental performance built into the choice rather than treated as a separate trade-off.

"We are considering the car not as a car," Marius says. "We are considering it a mobile workspace for our colleagues. Having that mindset, we are trying to deliver the best one, so they can focus on their job." In practice that means mandatory safety features, dual-zone climate control, and ergonomic seating.

When something goes wrong, drivers are not left alone. A 24-hour road assistance number is the first point of contact, with an external logistics provider behind it, and Marius and his team behind that. Robson experienced the same care in Brazil when a breakdown led to a prompt replacement vehicle. "Knowing the company provides support gives me confidence," he says.

From Curitiba’s morning traffic to Romania’s mountain roads and Milan’s hospital parking lots, the principle is the same: when the car is the workplace, it deserves the same care as any office. Safer, greener, and built around the people who drive them, Sanofi’s 12,000 vehicles will keep doing what they have done throughout the nearly three decades of Robson’s career: getting people where they need to be, and home again.