Are Fleets Ready to Electrify?

The curiosity surrounding fleet electrification is rising, and rightly so. Companies and the fleets that belong to them are seemingly always on the look-out for ways to become more sustainable, and electric vehicles may just be the road to take. 

The question is, how does an electrified fleet affect the organization to which it belongs?

Electric vehicles take center-stage

Electric vehicles, as well as other alternative fuel sources, are becoming increasingly popular. Newer technologies like these tend to have less real-world data surrounding their potential success within different industries when compared to their internal-combustion counterparts.

The largest pushback against fleet electrification comes from this lack of data as well as comparison to the current, reliable internal-combustion models already at work within the fleet industry. If you were to benchmark current electric vehicle data against standard internal-combustion data, you likely would see a difference in metrics like fuel cost per mile, vehicle lifecycle and maintenance costs.

Why?

The reason is simple. A fleet vehicle – such as a light-duty pickup truck or bucket truck – would have different needs than a standard passenger electric vehicle. They typically remain in service longer, have higher usage rates and require more energy.

This means that fleet managers need to consider charging infrastructure when weighing the pros and cons of fleet electrification. It will be important to ensure that while on a route or performing a task, that their vehicles won’t run out of power – paving the way for route planning and charging station location strategy in the future.

However, utility fleets do have an advantage here. The advantage is that their usage is much more predictable than the average passenger vehicle – therefore making infrastructure planning easier on upper-level management.

Planting the seeds for fleet electrification

It’s an exciting time to begin planting the seeds for fleet electrification – though any and all decisions surrounding it must be based on data rather than guesswork.

As fleet managers determine which aspects of their fleet can be fully electrified, they’ll need to turn to infrastructure planning to ensure that they have the charging capabilities to serve their new electric assets. 

The answers to these questions will be revealed as they take a detailed look at their existing fleet data – often using telematics to guide their decision making and operations processes.

Could commercial fleets manage the switch?

The question remains– do we think that fleets could take on the challenge of fleet electrification?

Potentially.

The key here is to be able to leverage your fleet data to identify which aspects of your fleet are best suited to electrification, and which are not. 

It won’t happen overnight, because it’s not a one-size-fits-all solution. 

But when we look to the future, we need to understand that the electric alternative could be a way to reduce the carbon footprint of utility fleets nation-wide, as well as a way to create a sustainable alternative for fuel-based fleets.

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