Electrifying a fleet: The big issues

Over the past two years, fleet decision-makers have become quite accustomed to virtual meetings via Teams or Zoom, but there’s no substitute for meeting face-to-face when you truly want to discuss the challenges you face and the solutions you are considering.

So Fleet News assembled a group of fleet managers for a roundtable discussion about all the elements of electrifying a fleet.

Responsible for running anywhere between a couple of hundred and almost 70,000 cars, vans and HGVs, in rural areas and cities, the delegates are at different stages of transitioning their vehicles to zero tailpipe emission motoring.

Sponsored by ChargePoint, the roundtable took place at Fanhams Hall in Hertfordshire.

Fleet News: How are you making the case for electrification?

Leroy Thomas, fleet manager, Affinity Water: We’re a water company and caring for our environment is part of what we are all about. As an industry we have made a commitment to be net carbon zero by 2030, and as a company we want our commercial vehicles, as they drive around our communities, to be seen as green vehicles.

So Fleet News assembled a group of fleet managers for a roundtable discussion about all the elements of electrifying a fleet.

Sponsored by ChargePoint, the roundtable took place at Fanhams Hall in Hertfordshire.

Fleet News: How are you making the case for electrification?

Simon King, partner, Edenseven: Business performance is now being measured across people, profit and planet. If you do the profit analysis the cost savings are huge. From a people point of view, 54% of Gen Z say their number one criterion for whom they work is sustainability. And for the planet, EVs mean cleaner air and fewer emissions. If you are doing fleet electrification because everyone else is, it’s very hard work, but if you can get C-Suite [top managers] to understand how it delivers on their business strategy then it will be a pull from them, not a push from you.

Tim Bailey, fleet director UK & Ireland, Redde Northgate: As a FTSE 250 company, we report our carbon emissions, and every single member of our management team has ESG as part of their personal objective. You potentially have to look at different processes and different ways of doing things to fit with your electric strategy, so it’s really critical getting buy-in from the top. But if you want investment in your business, funders will be looking at your ESG credentials, and procurement officers are looking at your ESG credentials in tenders, so it’s essential that businesses are taking this seriously.

Graham Short, talent acquisition manager, Culligan: Our 20 Nissan eNV200s are saving £72,000 a year on London congestion charges.

FN: How are you dealing with the vehicle supply situation?

Colin Jones, senior contracts manager, fleet and travel, Cancer Research: Lead times are a headache and manufacturer discounts have been rolled back.

Everyone: What discounts?!

TB: My challenge is with the manufacturers when they cancel orders and then allow you to reorder at today’s price. It’s disgraceful behaviour.

Andrew Hope, fleet development manager, Veolia UK: Typically, prices have gone up 10-15% across all brands, and some more than others. Lead times pre-Covid were 16 weeks and now it’s 12 months, but bodybuilders cannot hold their prices for that long because the cost of materials is going up, so they can’t quote us on chassis that won’t be delivered for a year. Plus, a typical manufacturer will quote you for Q1 and tell you your allocation – we might want 100 chassis but they say we can only have 10.

Lorna McAtear, fleet manager, National Grid: I’m formally extending the leases of my current EVs from three to four years.

Chris Woodcock, group fleet manager, Belron International: We had a bizarre scenario when we went to extend a batch of vehicles and we were given a price higher than the original rentals, because the leasing company wanted them back to realise the residual value profits.

FN: How easy is it to source appropriate electric vehicles?

LT: On the panel vans there is product out there and we can make the total cost of ownership model work, but when you look at dropsides, tippers, pick-ups and HGVs, either the product isn’t out there or it’s very expensive. My target is to electrify our panel vans and focus on the other type of vehicles in the second half of this decade when there will be more product out there and the costs will hopefully have come down.

AH: Very few councils can afford a fully electric fleet. A diesel refuse truck costs about £180,000 and an electric version is about £420,000.

Debbie Blantern, car fleet manager, Frontier Agriculture: Many of our agronomists drive pick-ups to visit farms on a daily basis. Some would move to a fully electric car as long as it’s got the ground clearance and pulling power of a pick-up to get out of a muddy field.

FN: What’s your policy on paying for home chargers for company drivers?

Gareth Wilsher, international fleet manager, AT&T Fleet Services: We didn’t pay for them, but employees did get the Government grant towards the cost, and their benefit in kind tax savings paid for the charger in just a few months.

LM: We haven’t paid for any home chargers for company car drivers.

SK: At my old fleet (Mitie) we paid for home chargers provided drivers stayed for six months. That used to be the payback period for EVs. Now the savings are almost immediate.

FN: What’s your strategy for installing workplace chargers?

GW: A couple of years ago we worked out that if we could convince 25 drivers to move from our average CO2 (125g/km) to sub 50g/km we could pay for 12 charging points over 18 to 24 months on Class 1A National Insurance savings alone.

Joe Gorman, director UK, Ireland and Nordics, ChargePoint: If you have charging at the workplace, drivers are six times more likely to change to an EV.

CWo: Our technicians take their vans home and most do not have off-street parking, so we need depot charging. But they only come to the depot to load up for 30 minutes and then go on to customers’ houses. We will put some chargers in depots, but only for a top-up. A typical branch will run five to 10 vans so we have to think about electricity capacity, too – that is a real hurdle.

Chase Watts, fleet services manager, Frontier Agriculture: We do have charge points at our bigger hubs, but these sites have been chosen because they have power capacity for our grain driers,
and most of our sites are maxed out at some time during the year. We have also installed solar at three of our 34 sites.

FN: How well does public charging support your fleet?

TB: For commercial vehicles, charging is a particular problem because so few people can charge at their own home and if you’re driving a long wheelbase van you can’t fit it in the parking bay.

LT: Operational downtime is one of our biggest challenges. Where we can get drivers to charge at home, that’s our best case, but the reality is they are going to need to top up at depots or en route, and when they top up there’s going to be downtime.

DB: Many of our drivers operate rurally and some are also driving 30,000 miles per year, about 200 miles per day, so they would need to be charging at least once per day, and the charge points aren’t there in the countryside.

FN: How are you finding the service, maintenance and repair costs of EVs?

TB: They really don’t need the same level or cost of repair. It’s so much easier to maintain them.

LM: We’re seeing a 70% reduction in maintenance costs.

GS: We have been running electric vans since 2018 and we have had nothing go wrong with them so far. General maintenance requirements are so much lower, but on the other hand, accident repairs can be more expensive – you might find the vehicle has to go to the main dealer for the battery to be disconnected, then back to the repairer to be fixed, and then back to the dealer to be reconnected.

AH: In the HGV sector, we cannot quantify any savings in maintenance yet because we don’t have enough operational experience, so we are forecasting parity with diesel because we still have to do seven-week inspections and we still have to maintain the bodywork and tyres.

FN: How are you reimbursing drivers for electric miles?

DB: We are reimbursing at the AER of 5p per mile, and working with our finance department on a new policy that will calculate the actual cost.

GS: Our car drivers are reimbursed at AER, while van drivers get a fully-expensed suite of cards or apps that are recharged to the business.

CJ: We are looking at some options with AllStar and Mina to calculate actual EV charging payments.

FN: If you could wave a magic wand to make electrification easier, where would you wave it?

CWo: We need a more robust charging infrastructure for commercial vehicles.

LT: We need a lower cost of charging at public sites. It’s a cost we cannot control, so we want to see it coming down.

CJ: Make it easier for drivers to charge – I probably have 15 different apps on my phone.

GS: I would like to see vehicle costs go down and manufacturer support come back.

CWa: Better rural charging infrastructure and transparency in energy pricing.

SK: A proper understanding of the financials of sustainability across businesses and employees alike. Can you think of any other area where there is the opportunity to save £1,800 to £6,000 per asset and yet they are not already doing it?

TB: For commercial vehicles we need a greater range of fit-for-purpose vehicles that are electrified (although there have been a couple of game changers in the past couple of years).

DB: We need clarification on benefit-in-kind rates after 2025.

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