Seven lessons from the Fleet Electrification frontline

What we learned from our webinar: Building resilient fleet charging - navigating the 2035 transition

Fleet electrification is no longer a question of if - for most organisations, it's firmly a question of how. How to plan around an evolving policy landscape. How to build a charging strategy that works in practice. How to make the numbers stack up and bring drivers along for the journey.

Those questions don’t have easy answers. But the organisations making the fastest progress have one thing in common; they stopped waiting for the perfect conditions and started working with the ones they have.

That was the central thread running through our recent webinar, chaired by Ian McKee at ChargeUK, which brought together Alice Aprile-Smith from Source, Paul O'Brien from Openreach - one of the UK's largest commercial fleet operators - and Niall Riddell, CEO of fleet charging technology company Paua. Over the course of the session, seven lessons emerged that are worth sharing with anyone navigating this transition.

1. Uncertainty is not a reason to wait

The ZEV Mandate has dominated headlines recently, and the debate around interim targets has given some organisations a convenient reason to pause.

Paul O‘Brien was direct about the consequences of delay. When uncertainty hits, he explained, the ripple effect runs through everything - procurement decisions, infrastructure investment, the resale market, the confidence of second-wave adopters who are watching to see whether the early movers made the right call. “It‘s not only the big fleets that are going first,” he said. "It‘s the people that come in second as well.” If the early movers stall, everyone stalls.

Alice Aprile-Smith acknowledged the uncertainty but was equally clear that it doesn‘t change the destination. The 2030 and 2035 dates remain in place. The direction of travel is settled. What the noise around the mandate actually does, she argued, is hand ammunition to the people inside organisations who were already looking for a reason to delay. “Keeping moving forward is the best thing to do to make sure you‘ve got enough time to plan” - and time, as the rest of the session made clear, is the one thing you can‘t recover once it‘s gone.

2. Electrification is a business transformation, not a vehicle project

One of the most consistent themes across the session was how rarely the panel talked about vehicles. The conversation kept returning instead to people - procurement teams, finance directors, operations managers, drivers, senior leadership. Fleet electrification, it turns out, is less of an engineering challenge than a change management one.

Paul O‘Brien put it plainly: “There‘s significant investment required. You want to take your people on the journey with you.” And critically, he added, it has to work commercially. Not as a sustainability initiative that finance tolerates, but as a decision that finance actively supports because the numbers back it up. The organisations getting this right are the ones that have stopped asking how to buy electric vehicles and started asking how electrification improves the business. Those are different questions with very different answers.

3. Find your internal champion - or nothing will move

Niall Riddell introduced a distinction that will be immediately recognisable to anyone who‘s worked inside a large organisation. Every fleet, he argued, has an ‘Eddie Electrification‘ and a ‘Fred the Fleet‘. Eddie has grabbed the topic, worked out the routes, figured out the low-hanging fruit, and is actively driving the transition. Fred would rather leave the fleet as it is.

“When we find Eddie, we know that fleet is moving,” Niall said. The businesses making fastest progress - whether large corporates or small SMEs - have found someone with the authority and the appetite to own the transition. Without that person, it doesn‘t matter how good the business case is or how well the technology has matured. The project stalls. Finding your Eddie, or being your Eddie, is arguably the most important first step any organisation can take.

4. There is no universal charging strategy - build an ecosystem instead

One of the most useful things the session challenged was the assumption that there‘s a single right model for fleet charging. There isn‘t. Every organisation has a different mix of driver circumstances, operating geography, vehicle types, shift patterns, and depot capacity - and the charging strategy has to reflect that reality rather than a textbook ideal.

Alice walked through the options. Home charging is cheapest in theory but often doesn‘t work in practice - some drivers don‘t want chargers on their driveway, some don‘t have driveways, some share vehicles. Depot charging solves some of those problems but introduces others, from grid capacity constraints to the risk Alice described of one fleet that completed a full depot installation only to be told the site was moving. Public charging fills gaps but comes with its own set of perceptions to overcome. The lesson is to stop looking for one answer and start building a strategy that uses all the options available.

5. Rethink what public charging actually costs

The cost of public charging is something fleet managers often question, and it‘s easy to understand why - the pay-as-you-go price most people see at a charge point is the price they assume fleets pay. On that basis, the comparison with home or depot charging can look straightforward. The reality, as both Alice and Niall explained, is considerably more nuanced.

Niall introduced the concept of total cost of charging - a different lens from the familiar total cost of ownership. When you factor in the full cost of depot infrastructure, the picture shifts. “If you turn up at a public charge point, you didn‘t have to install it, you put no capex down, you‘re not insuring it, you‘re not paying for the bay,” he explained. Someone else has absorbed all of those costs. The price on the screen is the total cost of charging. Compare that honestly to the fully loaded cost of a depot charger - including grid connection, installation, maintenance, insurance, and the opportunity cost of the space - and public charging often comes out looking far more competitive than it first appears.

Alice added that the pay-as-you-go price isn‘t even the price most fleets pay. Volume-based arrangements, negotiated tariffs, and roaming agreements mean there‘s considerably more room to manoeuvre commercially than most organisations realise. “When you start going under the bonnet,” she said, “there‘s actually quite a lot there.”

6. Data is what turns a charging strategy into a working operation

A charging strategy on paper and a charging strategy that actually works day-to-day are two different things. The gap between them, the panel agreed, is largely filled by data.

Alice described how overlaying fleet route data - where drivers go, how long they dwell, when they stop - with the public charging network reveals exactly where commercial arrangements can be put to use and where the gaps are. It also enables more granular understanding of individual driver patterns; well enough to tailor the incentives that actually get people to charge where you want them to charge.

Niall gave a concrete example of how Paua approaches this. Their ‘cheaper charging report‘ identifies, for every vehicle, whether there was a lower-cost alternative within half a mile of where the driver actually charged. It gives fleet managers the evidence to have a direct conversation with drivers and more often than not, Niall said, the reason comes down to convenience rather than ignorance. At least the tools exist to have that conversation.

Paul outlined how Openreach has gone further still, developing route mapping technology that accounts for the laden weight of its vans - because a fully loaded Openreach van has a materially different real-world range than the manufacturer‘s estimate. Getting that data right reduces range anxiety, helps drivers plan with confidence, and means charging stops happen where Openreach wants them to rather than wherever anxiety kicks in.

7. Learn from those ahead of you - and start before you think you need to

Paul reflected that Openreach‘s first serious push into electrification, around 2019, involved buying a significant number of vans before the infrastructure strategy was anywhere near ready. It was a valuable lesson, he said - not a regrettable one - and the point he drew from it was generous: smaller fleets starting today have an enormous advantage, because the Openreach-scale operators have already worked through those problems. “Lots of people understand what works and what doesn‘t,” he said. “That‘s their advantage.”

The broader message from the panel was that this is an unusually collaborative industry. Events, forums, peer networks - the knowledge is there, and people are willing to share it. What the organisations making fastest progress have in common isn‘t a bigger budget or a better-connected leadership team. It‘s that they started earlier, stayed flexible, and built strategies that could adapt as the market evolved around them.

As Ian McKee reflected towards the close of the session, the question facing fleet leaders isn‘t whether to begin planning. It‘s whether they‘ll have left themselves enough time if they don‘t.

Download Source's fleet white paper

For a deeper look at the themes covered in this session, download our free report: Electrifying UK Fleet Operations: Challenges, Strategies and the 2035 Deadline.