We recently shared a guide to electrifying your fleet with an EV adoption strategy. We’ve also published a guide to managing the risks of installing charger points at work, and a roundup of the various grants, risks, and targets for electric fleets.
In this post we’ll discuss how you can set an EV installation strategy for your electric fleet. Once you’ve made the case for electrifying your fleet, and once you’ve weighed up the risks and devised a roadmap for transitioning from petrol and diesel vehicles to electric vehicles, installing charge points should be your next step.
If you want some advice and support on the risk management and insurance implications of electrifying your fleet, our friendly team of commercial motor experts are always on hand to help. Call us on 020 8290 9099 or email us at commercial.motor@anthonyjones.com.
Where Should Businesses Install EV Chargers?
Installing chargers for vehicles is a matter of choice. You could install chargers on your site premises, provide your employees with home charging solutions, or allow your employees to rely on public chargers. Access to chargers is usually a combination of all three.
The approach you take will depend on a number of factors:
- Your vehicles. Do you own and operate your own fleet? Or is it a “grey fleet”, in which employees drive their own cars for work purposes?
- Your drivers. Where are your drivers based? Do they commute to your business premises and commence their business driving from there? Or do their business journeys tend to start from home?
- How you operate. What’s your fleet’s average monthly mileage? How large an area does your fleet cover, and what sort of business driving do you do? Is it courier work? Or do your employees simply drive to make sales calls, or to visit clients and other contacts?
- The wider charging infrastructure. What’s the charger availability like in the area you serve? Will your employees always be able to access chargers when they’re on the road? Or will they always have to return to the depot to get a charge?
- Your budget. Not all charging solutions will cost the same to implement. You may wish to install rapid chargers at your depot, but your ambition might outstrip your budget, forcing you to compromise.
Should Businesses Encourage EV Charger Installation at Home, Work, or Use Public Infrastructure?
There are pros and cons to each approach:
Providing Employees Home EV Chargers
Providing your employees with chargers for the home will ensure that every driver in your fleet can start the day with a fully charged electric car.
However, home charging presents a number of difficulties. Some of your employees may live in homes where it’s impractical to install chargers. Some may rent, in which case there’ll be limits to what they can do to their home. Plus, if you have a high staff turnover, you may feel reluctant to make such an investment in your employees.
Finally, home charging can present certain administrative issues. Your employees can easily invoice you for fuel expenses, but it might not be so easy for them to accurately quote the amount of home electricity they’ve used to charge their cars.
Creating the Infrastructure for Workplace Charging
If your fleet drivers return to a central location or depot at the end of each working day, then installing workplace charging stations is the obvious solution. Work charging is also useful if your drivers work variable shift patterns, as employees will always be able to charge their EVs during working hours.
Installing chargers at work could also allow you to benefit from smart charging schemes. This means you could use the electricity stored in electric vehicles to power your business premises. Or, you could sell your stored electricity back to the grid, for profit.
Yet there are downsides to workplace charging. There will be a substantive upfront cost, and you may not have the space available to install practical charging solutions. Plus, if you install onsite chargers, you will have to take responsibility for managing, maintaining, and servicing your chargers. You will have to consider how this affects your business insurance.
Should Businesses Rely on Public Charging for EV Fleets?
The UK’s charging infrastructure is getting bigger and more reliable all the time. You should not expect to rely entirely on public charging points to power your electric fleet. Instead, you should rely on public charging solutions to support your electric fleet operations – particularly when it comes to long-distance travel.
A major disadvantage of public charging is that it tends to cost a lot more than workplace or home-based charging. You may have to pay up to five times more for every kWh, which will obviously undermine the business case for electrifying your fleet.
Finally, charging takes time. If your drivers are on a tight schedule, it might be impractical to expect them to seek out charging points when they’re out on the road, in the middle of the day.
You can get a good idea of the availability of public chargers in your area with the Zapmap.
How Many EV Chargers Does a Fleet Need?
Ideally, you’ll have one charger for every electric vehicle in your fleet. This way, every employee who drives an electric vehicle will always be able to access a charger whenever they need to.
It’s unlikely that you’ll electrify your entire fleet overnight. It will more likely be a gradual process, taking place over the course of months, or even years. So, to begin with, you’ll probably only have a small number of electric vehicles in your fleet. This means that, initially, you will only have to invest in a handful of chargers, too.
You will have to plan your electrification strategy so that the number of chargers scales in line with the number of electric vehicles in your fleet. You should never find yourself in a situation where you have more vehicles than chargers.
We Can Support You Throughout Your Fleet Electrification Process
If you want some advice and support on the risk management and insurance implications of electrifying your fleet, our friendly team of commercial motor experts are always on hand to help. Call us on 020 8290 9099 or email us at commercial.motor@anthonyjones.com.
