Q&A: The dawn of an EV-first era

Every year we’ve been in business, we’ve thought: “This is the year EVs are going to be mass market.” I think it’s fair to say we’re finally there. Every manufacturer is committed to an electrification programme, there is legislation driving it forward and then, of course, there is increased demand from consumers for the product.

Our business is focused primarily on fleets, vans, trucks, buses and depots. A huge number of businesses have a committed agenda to electrify by 2030, 2035, or maybe even 2040. Most have already started deploying EVs on their fleets. So now it’s very much about scaling up.

My thoughts on this have changed recently. EVs have received more than their fair share of criticism in the press, so to know that we’ve got legislation to move this case forward is reassuring.

When we look at fleets - vans, trucks, and buses - they’re all quite different. Buses are a legislation-driven market with lots of subsidies. There’s lots of pollution in cities and a really great way to remove that is to decarbonise public transportation. Yes, it’s a big project – and its expensive. But that combination of subsidy and legislation has encouraged the bus market to electrify.

At the same time, you’ve got this amazing social shift because consumers are taking climate change seriously. Some of this legislation hopefully just makes change happen faster.

Of the 1.56 billion vehicles on the road roughly 16% of them are used commercially, yet they create about 40% of road emissions. We’re targeting what might look like a niche market in terms of the number of vehicles, but it accounts for an outsized proportion of air pollution. Fleet electrification is helping to solve this key societal problem.

Fleet electrification is a big and complicated beast. There are lots of things that need to be taken into account, but the only way to operationalise EVs commercially is to commit.

The sticker price can be a bit scary, but that’s changing. There is a lot of price pressure coming from electric vehicles made in China hitting our market. We’re going to see the price of these types of vehicles fall significantly over time.

Long term, they are cheaper to operate. Think about the fuel and the maintenance costs going into the vehicles and add that up over several years. Businesses with traditional fleets will often have workshops inside their facilities, where their buses have to be regularly serviced. By moving those vehicles to electric they are getting far fewer issues.

There should be no more excuses around range, either. People are concerned about public charging, but if the average daily mileage is less than 40 miles (which is the case for many fleets) this shouldn’t be an issue.

We launched what we call ‘charging as a service’. There are so many things ‘as a service’ now. But for us, that ‘service’ is funding everything: the charging infrastructure, the software, the maintenance so customers can just pay per month or per kilowatt hour.

Our job, ultimately, is to try and make moving to electric vehicles as simple as possible. Capital is another barrier to entry, so funding these things for our customers is important.

Concerns have cropped up over the grid’s capacity to handle a surge in EVs. That said, with the transition there will be a massive shift in how we use energy. We’ve spent considerable time developing a product called EO Hub that enables on-site power use, bypassing the need for expensive and labour-intensive grid upgrades.

Energy management strategies, such as scheduling vehicle charging during off-peak hours, will mean a reduction in refuelling costs and continuous grid enhancements. The other thing to note is that EVs will soon contribute power to the grid. So, if people are concerned about energy management, they absolutely should not be.