Charge Together Fleets

When it concerns owning an electric vehicle fleet, a lot is being said about the imminent takeover of the consumer vehicles sector by EVs. Bloomberg New Energy Finance recently released an updated analysis that stated that EVs will comprise 54% of new car sales by 2040 and more than one-third of all vehicles on the road. That is surely a lot of vehicles, but what happens to be missing is the impact that EVs will be having when it comes to vehicle fleets.

Typically, fleet vehicles put tons of miles on the road within a short time. They wear breaks down, burn through fuel, and place a heavy strain on virtually all of a vehicle’s moving parts. This is why, for fleets, EVs make so much sense. They just don’t feature that many moving components, their breaks last much longer because of regenerative braking, batteries can now last much over 100,000 miles, and the costs of electricity are typically one-third of fuel prices. All of these features make EVs most ideal for fleet purposes and several companies are beginning to look into what EV fleets require.

1. Charging infrastructure is central

The foremost problems that any fleet has to prevail over are access to charging. Similar to multi-family housing real estate, fleets need hundreds of charging stations in garages that just were not designed to power those automobiles and incorporating enough charging infrastructure is challenging and costly. This is surely among the foremost challenges of EV fleet management. Several individuals have assumed larger public charging stations’ buildout will meet this need, but that doesn’t work for fleets. Observe current fleet vehicles and you will see that lots of them never visit local fuel stations. Have you ever seen any bus waiting in line at your local fuel station? Most probably not and the reason is quite simple; it faster and much cheaper to own a fuel depot for refuelling requirements, and it’s same for EVs.

1. It is all a matter of range

Some vehicles in some fleets journey more than 300 miles daily, and unfortunately, this is a truly tall order for virtually all EVs presently being offered in the market. Actually, there are just but a few EVs capable of doing this, and they typically retail for thousands of dollars, way above what a usual gas vehicle in a fleet runs for. The difference in cost, for some users, overshadows all advantages. Even though this might appear to be a total non-starter, the typical EV drives for about 120 miles daily; for that kind of range, lots more EVs are offered for far more affordable prices. And, considering the lack of the kind of maintenance that fuel cars demand, an EV is a lot cheaper in the long run when compared to a conventional fuel-burning vehicle.

In conclusion, the majority of EVs that have been released onto the market recently, including even those you will find in an electric vehicle fleet, feature ranges that are much longer than 120 miles and the average range of all of the most recently announced EVs is way more than 200 miles. As range problems become history, progressively more fleet operators count on switching to fully electric fleets.