Opinion: How fleets have learnt to forecast electric vehicle SMR

By Tim Meadows, chief operating officer at Epyx

Arguably, 6th April 2020 was the day fleet electrification began in earnest. That was when benefit-in-kind taxation on electric company cars was reduced to 0%, giving drivers a huge incentive to leave behind their current petrol or diesel model and go electric – something they have since done by the hundreds of thousands.

It was a huge change and one of the biggest challenges it created was simply, how do vehicle operators forecast service, maintenance and repair (SMR) for a fuel type of which they – and almost everyone else – had little or no experience?

For years, SMR predictions had been based on a combination of historical data and examination of the latest model.

If a medium sized diesel hatchback from a particular manufacturer had cost a certain amount on average over the last decade, then looking at the newest version and the experience of operating thousands of these cars gave you the means to estimate likely outlay quite precisely, with few real surprises.

Electric cars were different. There was no shortage of predictions from manufacturers telling you what their new models should cost to operate but almost no real-world data. Fleets set SMR budgets but the wide variances that could be seen only underlined the lack of experience. Everyone was taking a leap into the dark.

Recently, at Fleet and Mobility Live, it was suggested that this situation was persisting to a degree but in our view, it should be acknowledged that huge progress has been made. 

We now have over 550,000 electric cars (BEVs) registered on our industry standard 1link Service Network SMR platform, up from nearly 25,000 at the start of 2020. 

Yes, it’s nowhere near the several million petrol and diesel cars that have been registered on the platform since it was launched more than 20 years ago but it’s enough to provide genuinely meaningful data.

For some time, we resisted making our information public in any form simply because the amounts we held weren’t sufficient to build a consistent picture. 

However, over the last couple of years, that situation has changed and we’ve begun to make it available – in general terms to help build industry awareness of electric car SMR, but also in more detail commercially. For fleet operators, we can now deliver what we believe to be an impressive level of granularity.

Of course, issues remain. There are limited numbers of vehicles over four years old on 1link Service Network, so we have restricted experience of older electric cars. 

Also, the infrastructure supporting electric car maintenance is still very much in development, meaning pricing and service levels can sometimes be inconsistent. 

All of this means that setting SMR budgets for electric cars is still more difficult than petrol equivalents.

However, in the vast majority of cases, fleets can now forecast SMR with a relatively high degree of certainty. From a standing start a little more than four years ago, we believe that is a huge achievement.