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Fleet electric van adoption still a big challenge, BVRLA warns
Date: Thursday, July 14, 2022 | Author: Sean Keywood
More needs to be done to incentivise fleet adoption of electric vans, according to the BVRLA.
The rental and leasing industry body’s chief executive Gerry Keaney was among those addressing the issue at the organisation’s Fleets in Charge conference.
He explained how, while BVRLA members’ car fleets were set to outpace UK Government zero-emission targets, vans were comparatively struggling.
He said: “We can see already the price of commercial vehicles makes them extremely difficult to justify as a business case.
“There is a lack of tax incentives to support the fleet sector, inadequate charging infrastructure to support the rather specific needs of the fleet sector, and we believe on top of that there’s an absolute scarcity of the right sort of commercial vehicles, with many different use cases to be addressed from OEMs.
“It’s getting better, but there is still much more that needs to be done, and it needs to be done faster.”
Keaney’s concerns were echoed at the event by Association of Fleet Professionals chair Paul Hollick.
He said: “At the moment very few [AFP members] are electrifying their vans fleets, because they are worried about reimbursing home energy, they are worried about functionality on the EV highway. They’ve got availability issues as well, but overall it’s a challenge at the moment.
“I personally worry about the electric future for vans at the moment and being able to hit the 2030 target.”
Hollick spoke during a panel discussion alongside BT Openreach senior sustainability manager Andrew Kirkby, who explained that charging was a significant challenge for a sizeable proportion of his van fleet.
He said: “A third of our fleet is taken home with no facility to plug them in anywhere, so we are going to have to rely on the public charging network. And although we’ve got such a large fleet we are not really a fleet operator, we are a telecommunication and engineering company, and to put customers first, we don’t want to take away any productivity.
“It's not just popping on a charger for 30 minutes – it’s a 30 minute drive to get to that charger, then potentially wait 30 minutes for someone using that charger, then 30 minutes to drive back, so all of a sudden we’re seeing a 90 minute impact on productivity.”
Kirkby also pointed out that the relatively expensive cost of charging electric vans using public infrastructure could sway total cost of ownership calculations back in favour of diesel vans.
However, the AFP’s Hollick said that fleets were generally not too concerned about these costs for the moment.
He said: “Most fleets at the moment aren’t too worried about the cost of EV highway charging. That will come as they go into an optimisation phase, but at the moment they’re in the adoption phase, and operational downtime cost is far greater than a 75p per kWh charge point.
“If it’s a matter of using a charger five minutes from a job, or 20 minutes from a job, you will use the one five minutes away even if it’s more expensive.”
Image credit: BVRLA
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