FN: What electric vehicle training do drivers receive?

JF: Anyone that drives an electric vehicle will now do the Energy Saving Trust’s (EST) training course.

I’ve done it – I do all the training courses before I make anyone else do them because it’s not fair for me quote it and not do it – and it covers the areas where you get the maximum regeneration to prolong your battery life.

FN: Considering drivers pay for their own fuel, why did you decide to put them through the EST’s smarter driver training programme?

JF: Our business is transporting people from one place to the next, so it’s in our interests to make sure they are driven safely.

With the smarter driver training, yes, drivers are taught how to save themselves fuel, but that also incorporates not speeding, not braking sharply, not accelerating harshly, not going round corners too fast or doing rough lane changes.

Ninety per cent of our drivers have now been trained and the only reason that isn’t higher is that we haven’t yet been able to train the night-time staff because of the shifts they work.

When we first offered the training, no-one wanted to do it. Their attitude was ‘I’ve been driving for ages, you can’t teach me to suck eggs’.

But I said to them ‘give it a chance, it can save you money’ and now I have drivers asking me when the next course is.

FN: Why do you have a mix of vehicle types on your fleet?

JF: Our business doesn’t sit into one niche market – we do corporate work, VIP work and what I would call ‘bread and butter’ work such as school runs.

We couldn’t just say we’re going to run only hybrids from now on because although the Toyota Prius is great you can’t get four people and four suitcases in.

FN: How do you ensure the right vehicle is chosen for the job?

JF: We invested in Cordic, which is an automated booking system. It enables you to input a lot of parameters so you can get the right car to the right pick-up in the right timeframe.

So we programme it with the type of work that particular vehicles are capable of.

It has reduced our dead mileage significantly and we can generate CO2 reports from it.