Provide has adopted Spark EV’s artificial intelligence-based journey prediction product to help with range anxiety across its electric vehicle (EV) fleet.

Provide delivers health and care services such as community nursing, physiotherapy and podiatry to patients across Essex, outer London and East Anglia, covering a population of 1.9 million people.

Many of its staff are mobile, visiting patients in their own homes, community clinics and community hospitals.

It is rolling out EVs across its fleet, with Spark technology to help vehicles complete more journeys between charges, remove range anxiety and enable greater fleet utilisation, with up to 20% more journeys completed between charges, it said.

Spark works by collecting live driver, vehicle and other data sources, such as the weather and congestion, via an in-car sensor and then using its cloud-based machine learning algorithms to provide more accurate journey predictions for electric vehicles.

Fleet managers and drivers enter their proposed journey into Spark’s smartphone app and get advice on whether they will be able to complete it - based on live data, previous trips and charge point locations.

This, it says, delivers reassurance to fleet managers and drivers that they will be able to schedule and complete jobs without running out of charge, removing range anxiety while increasing the amount of potential vehicle journeys by an additional 2.8 per day.

“We understand the benefits of EVs in terms of increasing efficiency and demonstrating our green credentials to the communities we serve,” said Philip Richards, executive finance director and company secretary at Provide.

“At the same time our patients rely on us being in the right place at the right time, meaning it is vital that our EV fleet is used efficiently, without staff needing to worry about not being able to complete their schedules due to running out of charge.

“By quickly providing us with more accurate journey predictions Spark EV removes range anxiety and is therefore accelerating our EV adoption.”

As part of its EV rollout Provide is installing charge points at five of its sites and is planning to expand its fleet of Nissan Leaf EVs.

As Spark continually improves its journey predictions based on previous trips, Provide will be able to use these learnings to optimise its EV usage and increase confidence within its workforce, it said.

“Provide’s adoption of Spark EV demonstrates how our technology can support the move to widescale electric vehicle adoption,” said Justin Ott, CEO, Spark EV Technology.

“Provide is now able to ensure that its mobile workers can operate efficiently and effectively, overcoming range anxiety, while delivering vital services to patients within the community. It is a perfect use case of how we can help EV adoption within any fleet.”

Delivered through a monthly subscription model, Spark integrates with existing fleet management/scheduling systems through its open API, or can be used as a standalone solution for smaller fleets and can be installed with all current EVs.