Fleet News Awards roundtable: the challenge of electrifying van fleets

Electrification and risk management continue to be at the top of the agenda for almost all fleet decision-makers, and these were among the hot topics discussed at the Fleet News Awards roundtable earlier this month.

The event, sponsored by sopp+sopp, featured fleet decision-makers who were shortlisted for this year’s Fleet News Awards.

During the discussion, they shared experiences and best practice advice to help their peers meet many of the challenges they faced.

For more on the awards, we have produced a digital magazine including all results and photographs from the night, while there is also a gallery of pictures available.

Fleet News: What progress are you making with electrifying your fleets?

James Rooney, head of road fleet at Network Rail: We’ve had to put a line in the sand for diesel, because if we keep on leasing diesel vans on five-year leases, as we have been doing, then those leases will go over the 2030 extended deadline we have for electrification.

So right now, we are taking delivery of out last diesels. But how the hell do you move four-wheel drives, large vans and welfare vans right now?

Cars, small vans and stuff like that, we’re doing it in our sleep almost. But the others are very difficult.

Chris Mullings, senior fleet manager at Openreach: We probably have the same issues with large vans. We don’t have a problem in deploying electric medium vans – we have a real-world range of 125 miles with ours and our engineers do an average of 48.5 miles, so we are well within the capacity of the vehicle.

We are looking at on-board power solutions. Ford offers an onboard power solution which looks like it should be able to deliver the majority of our functionality. We are working with Clayton to see how that will integrate with our systems.

James Rooney: The main issue we found with welfare is the heating element. We found that a welfare van which does an eight-hour shift overnight will use between 8kW and 16kW, which is about 20% of the capacity of the van’s battery. It’s a big chunk of electricity.

Simon Gray, head of fleet at SSE: The majority of our vans are used by specialist engineers - high voltage engineers, linesmen, etc.

As we’ve seen over the past year, storms are becoming more prevalent. How do we send those engineers with an electric van into a storm situation where there’s no power? That really is our challenge. We can mitigate slightly against it, but we can’t get over that challenge.

FN: How are fleets balancing driver workloads with the need to charge their electric vans during the working day?

Dermot Coughlan, fleet director, Kelly Fleet Services: One of the biggest challenges is how our engineers can do a day’s work. For example, if a guy is supposed to do 10 jobs in a day, now he’s down to six.

So do we put on another crew to cover the extra work? So instead of you having one van on the road, do you then have two vans on the road? And economically, can you get that to work? That’s a really big challenge for us, and it’s mostly on the bigger stuff.

S-J Mitchell, senior fleet supply chain manager, OVO Energy: We’re at 98% electric with our van fleet of nearly 1,000 vehicles. We go right the way up into the Highlands and Islands, and the drivers will drive from the south of England all the way up to the islands over a period of days, and they stop and charge. They just do it.

It’s not been easy. The biggest challenge for us is drivers saying “my van won’t make it. I won’t make it”. And I know it’s a cliché, but most of the time the drivers need to stop before the van does.

We offer them A Better Route Planner app. In that app you can put in what load you’re carrying, what the weather is like, how far you need to travel, what charge you need to get there – a whole raft of things.

It will use this information and will tell you where to stop and how long for. It will say ‘stop here for 12 minutes and that will get you to x, where you can charge again for x minutes.

Most drivers will go “I’m not stopping for 12 minutes, I’ve got to stop for three hours”, but everyone who has used the app got better efficiency, their range anxiety disappeared, and they use it all the time now.

I’ve had to work with our planning and scheduling team to say they need to factor in time to charge, but we don’t use it as dead time. We use that as time for the drivers to catch up on their paperwork or their emails.

Chris Mullings, senior fleet manager at Openreach: One of the problems I have with people who charge on the public network. We’re seeing between 7% and 10% inefficiency across the working week, and my issue is how do we efficiently use that time?  Ideally I want people to tidy the van, catch-up on paperwork etc.

S-J Mitchell: We don’t have any depots, so all of our fleet is back to the drivers’ homes at the end of the day, but under 30% of our drivers have home charge points.

We have telematics so we can see when someone is at a charge point and they’re not connected. So it’s about using that data and feeding that back to the relevant managers and the drivers, not in a ‘big brother is watching you’ way, but to ask what they were doing and what more assistance they need.

But equally, I have drivers who are public charging well after their working hours when they get home because they want to be ready for the next day. And I have to have those conversations as to ‘you’re not in work, so don’t do it’.

It kind of all goes back to A Better Route Planner. I don’t force any driver to use it, but I heavily encourage them to.

Fleet News: How are you improving driver safety and risk management on your fleets?

James Ferrol, car and van fleet manager at Dunelm: We’ve started a real focus on safety, so I’ve started really looking at our accidents and starting to work on a methodology on how we highlight low, medium and high-risk drivers, and then what we do on the back of that.

We’re also going to have six-monthly inspections of company cars, where the driver will have to upload six photos of their vehicles. We’re beginning on this journey of starting to hold people accountable for any damage.

We’re also looking at how we monitor driver behaviour, especially on the van fleet.

Dermot Coughlan, fleet director, Kelly Fleet Services: It’s very hard to tell and quantify that safety equipment fitted to vehicles has stopped an accident.

We only started buying PHEVs in September, which have autonomous emergency braking, and we have five on-camera incidents now where the van stopped the accident, not the driver because on the internal camera you can see the guy’s foot didn’t move but you can see the vehicle braking.

With the cameras, we’re heading down the AI route for distracted driving, which is our biggest concern and our biggest reason for having accidents.

When we recruit people, we tell them ‘this is how it works, this is what we’re doing’ when it comes to cameras. It’s in the driver handbook, which is also our driving policy, and the drivers sign it to say they know there’s a vehicle management system in there, which will record information and monitor behaviour.

You can use it for loads of different things. If you don’t have the accident in the first place, you’re quids in – no harm, no cost. If everybody’s driving really well, you’re going to save money on your fuel or electricity.

James Rooney, head of road fleet at Network Rail: You also get auto FNOL (first notification of loss) with most in-cab cameras, so if you have drivers reporting accidents quite slowly, the camera – along with other systems in the vehicle – detects when you have the incident and automatically reports that.

We also use that as a health check – we can ring the driver and say ‘we know you’ve had a collision, are you ok?’, so it’s a welfare piece as well.

Dermot Coughlan: Telematics and cameras allow you to identify your worst drivers, but also means you can identify your better drivers.

We score drivers 0-100 on their performance and anybody who is at 98 or above every day for six months joins an elite driver club.

They have kudos. They get a jacket, a backpack and some other gear and a lot of people want to be an elite driver. We have a draw for everybody who has been in the elite driver club for the past month so someone in that group will get £1,000.

Every six months we have a bigger prize, which could be a weekend away or something. The cost of it gets offset by the savings we make through better driving – it pays for itself. Last year we had 16 guys that hit 100 every single day for the entire year, so in the next couple of months we’re going to do a corporate day out for them.

Roundtable delegates:

Alex Davies, fleet manager, Consumer Energy Solutions

James Ferrol, car and LCV fleet manager, Dunelm

Steve Davidson, road fleet manager, GB Railfreight

Dermot Coughlan, fleet director, Kelly Fleet Services

James Rooney, head of road fleet, Network Rail

Chris Mullings, senior fleet manager, Openreach

S-J Mitchell, senior fleet supply chain manager, OVO Energy

Matt Neale, head of fleet and MaaS, Platform Housing Group

Stuart Murphy, head of fleet transformation, Royal Mail

Andrew Teer, transport operations manager, Smith Brothers Stores

Simon Gray, head of fleet, SSE

Lee McGrath, group fleet manager, The Airedale Group

Chris Beeby, director of business development, soppp+sopp

Anthony Roberts, account director, sopp+sopp