Are you taking action to reduce your fleet’s carbon emissions and combat climate change? If your answer is yes then I’m sure you have a strategic plan backed up with data and a strict timeline for progress. Making the switch to electric vehicles (EVs) may seem like the easy way to shrink your fleet’s carbon footprint, but it’s not a change that can be completed in isolation. Successfully reducing your fleet’s carbon footprint depends on identifying vehicles that are fit for the Job, cost-effective to operate, and can be recharged without disrupting operations.

Fleet partners like ForWare can provide you with software to monitor a fleet’s current vehicle usage, analysing the distances that are driven daily to see which vehicles could complete journeys without having to recharge along the way. When this monitoring and analysis has been completed, fleet managers and their advisors can now create a report of potential battery-powered replacements for existing diesel vehicles.

Making the right comparison

With this journey report in place, fleet decision-makers can start to build a financial business case for EVs, based on a Total Cost of Ownership (TCO). Taking into account any grants available, EVs will have higher acquisition costs than ICE models, but there are in-life savings like cheaper energy costs and lower service and maintenance costs? This can all help support the TCO of EVs in comparison with ICE.

But be careful when it comes to SMR (Service Maintenance Repair) cost, ask yourself, do I currently know what my ICE service costs are? Remember this is not just servicing and Brakes this should encompass everything like Tyres, Glass, Crash Repairs, and Recovery. It should also include rebates and management fees. If you don’t have this data easily accessible for ICE, then will you have it for EV? There is a perception out there that EV service will be cheaper and this should be the case but as the old saying goes “If you can’t measure it you can’t manage it” If you currently don’t have good, accessible, data on your ICE fleet will this be any different for your EV Fleet?

Now don’t get me wrong, we also need to factor in the “Environmental and societal benefits of using EVs” (e.g. greenhouse gas emissions combined with the overall public health benefits) with the total cost of moving to EV. You have to look at THE BIG PICTURE – for now, it may be a little more expensive. But like me, and as a fleet manager you need to be able to present THE BIG PICTURE to the decision makers in your business, and to do this you need reliable data.

Now, there is a lot more to EV transition than SMR and journey plans, but these two require good information. Next week let’s look at Workshop requirements for EV SMR.

If you are making the change to EV and need some guidance, or you are wondering what data you should be considering on the road to reducing your fleet carbon emissions, please drop me an email and let’s set up a call: alan@forware.io. 

You can also call me on 021 4845554.