Why Some Fleets Have A Better Case To Go Electric Than You Do

Innovation Why Some Fleets Have A Better Case To Go Electric Than You Do Matt Stevens Forbes Councils Member Forbes Technology Council COUNCIL POST Expertise from Forbes Councils members, operated under license. Opinions expressed are those of the author. | Membership (fee-based) Aug 11, 2022, 08:00am EDT | Share to Facebook Share to Twitter Share to Linkedin Matt Stevens, Board of Advisors, Geotab .

getty When the first wave of electric vehicles (EVs) began to appear in 2011, the early adopters were either people with high disposable incomes or “tree-huggers. ” Being a startup cofounder with a ramen-stocked cupboard, only one of those categories applied to me. In any case, buying an EV involved a cost or compromise that required significant motivation.

Over a decade later, economic forces and environmental concerns have resulted in a different category of buyers rapidly increasing their demand for EVs. Namely, the fleet buyer. When thinking about fleets, it’s important to remember that fleets are not a monolith.

It’s best to view them in terms of fleet segments. A last-mile fleet differs from a long-haul fleet, which is different from a municipal fleet, and so on. Both the use patterns and vehicle types vary between segments.

Broadly, vehicle types are grouped into three high-level categories. • Light duty: Utility and passenger vehicles, goods and panels vans, etc. • Medium duty: Vans, trucks, buses, specialty vehicles, etc.

• Heavy duty: City transit and school buses, semi-trucks/tractors, etc. Each fleet segment will have a mix of light-, medium- and heavy-duty vehicles necessary to satisfy the segment’s vocation. And that mix will be similar across most fleets within that specific segment.

By contrast, fleets of a different segment will have a significantly different mix of vehicles. MORE FOR YOU Google Issues Warning For 2 Billion Chrome Users Forget The MacBook Pro, Apple Has Bigger Plans Google Discounts Pixel 6, Nest & Pixel Buds In Limited-Time Sale Event This variation in the fleet mix is one of three main factors that impact the electrification opportunity because the availability of relevant and cost-competitive EV models differs across vehicle categories. Over the past few years, EV models have started appearing in nearly all vehicle categories; however, the difference in availability and cost efficiency from segment to segment remains significant.

The second of the three factors is drive cycle distribution. For fleet segments where a variety of EV models are available, EVs prove to perform better than personally owned EVs. When considering an EV for personal use, many prospective buyers focus on that “one trip” to the cottage or a remote destination that lacks a charging point.

This is why personal vehicles must have batteries that can withstand larger usage than your average day-to-day drive. I like to call this the “cottage trip premium. ” The last-mile delivery van doesn’t have a cottage trip; it does a single job.

This difference stands out when we look at use-case data from fleet vehicles versus personally owned vehicles. This is an important point for the economics and environmental benefits of an EV. When a vehicle is bought with the “cottage trip premium,” a vehicle with a larger battery is purchased.

That increases the cost of the vehicle significantly. While you can still get a positive payback in some of these cases, the payback is generally much better if you can avoid this premium. And for fleet vehicles with consistent daily distances, you can.

An easy way to measure the efficiency of battery sizing is to divide the kWh that a given vehicle battery stores/delivers over a year by the rated capacity of that battery. A vehicle that stores/delivers 9000 kWh in a year from a 50kWh battery is better utilized than another vehicle that utilizes a 90kWh battery to deliver that same 9000 kWh. Since the kWh delivered is a proxy for both the emissions avoided and cost savings, the better this ratio, the better the economic and environmental case.

This ratio isn’t perfect, but it’s pretty darn good. Since some fleet vehicles can achieve a very high ratio, the economic payback and environmental benefit for those fleet vehicles can be phenomenal. Fleets of all sizes are starting to leverage their telematics devices to “hunt” for these perfect EV opportunities in their existing fleet.

And policymakers, take note. With forecasts suggesting that we are going into a period of limited battery supply , just as society is aggressively seeking to reduce transportation emissions, having the highest environmental and economic benefit with each MWh of battery supply will be important. The third and final factor is the charging infrastructure needed.

Many fleet vehicles sleep at the depot, while others are taken home by employees. There are trade-offs to both scenarios with plenty of nuances. Many factors go into planning fleet charging infrastructure, and data from the telematics systems installed on existing gasoline and diesel vehicles can help address those factors.

In commercial fleets, getting this right is critical. Fleet operating costs are significant, and maintaining (or improving) operations while reducing total operating costs is a strategic advantage. In the fleet segments with the highest electrification rates, the laggards are starting to struggle.

Learning how to operate a fleet with electric vehicles does have a learning curve, and the concept of organizational learning is real. For public fleets, getting this right enables the fleet to achieve its emission goals while reducing its overall costs—a highly welcome win-win scenario when high inflation rates are stretching everyone’s budgets. Putting Rubber On The Road Enterprise Fleet Management, a leading fleet management provider with more than 649,000 vehicles across North America, worked with our company to analyze vehicle data and identify potential electrification and cost-saving opportunities for its customers.

Through an extensive and comprehensive study that included 91,252 vehicles, Enterprise Fleet Management discovered that 13% or 12,000 leased vehicles were good candidates to be swapped out for range-capable EVs. The study also found that those 12,000 vehicles would save $33 million and eliminate 194,000 tons of tailpipe CO2 emissions over four years. Likewise, the company learned that if it electrified half its fleet, it could save $167 million or $4,056.

20 per vehicle. Green Fleets Of All Sizes Are Coming Transportation accounts for the greatest source of greenhouse gas emissions in the U. S.

, with most of those emissions coming from fleet vehicles. Even if everyone in a neighborhood could agree to drive EVs, the majority of transportation emissions will remain if the fleets don’t go electric. Fortunately, for many fleets, the case to go electric is even stronger than the individual buying for them and their family.

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