What you need to know about switching to an electric vehicle fleet

How you approach incorporating EVs into your fleet will depend on your business goals. Is your priority to reduce CO2 emissions to a minimum, or does this need to be balanced with maintaining or even reducing Whole Life Costs vs petrol or diesel vehicles?

The potential benefits from transitioning to EVs may vary considerably across your fleet. Analyse your drivers’ current usage patterns (with telematics if you can) to identify where the best opportunities are.

Depending on your fleet driving patterns, workplace charging, home charging or public charge points (or a combination of these) may be most suitable. Each comes with benefits and drawbacks as well as cost implications, so working out how you’ll fuel your vehicles will help you narrow down which vehicle types should be on your shortlist.

Because EVs typically have higher list prices than their diesel or petrol equivalents, it’s doubly-important to take a wholistic view which takes into account costs across the full life of the vehicle. That means including not just the up-front costs but also the maintenance, servicing, repairs, and charging-related costs. Often this will allow you to identify opportunities for cost savings vs petrol/diesel vehicles.

With a new kind of vehicle (and fuel) to manage, you’ll need to update your policies and processes to make it easy for your drivers to adapt to any changing responsibilities and processes (e.g. using electric charge cards or charge point journey planners).