What was the motivation for putting electric vehicles on the fleet?

Adam Davies: It’s a big tick in the green box for Wiltshire Council. Our CO2 is massive as an organisation because it’s an owned fleet and we’ve got refuge vehicles. We’re trying to find any which way we can to reduce our carbon. We’ve got route optimisation, various telematics schemes, various in-cab driver technology. Electric vehicles and ULVEs were the next way to go.

Jo Hammonds: It was a joint project between us and the local authority where we placed these vehicles. They wished to put charging points round the city and they wanted someone to use the vehicles round the city. It was never going to make a dent in our CO2 as we’ve got three vehicles but it’s in terms of the PR it’s brought and the ability to charge in a real world environment. I think in the longer term, if we’ve got branches that are thinking about taking some electric vehicles they can go and see some in operation. I think the PR side of things has been very good for us on that front. It has highlighted driver education and the way we can change an operation to work with them in certain areas.

Are there any things you have changed as a result of running electric vehicles?

Adam Davies: We do full inductions with all our electric vehicle drivers if they’re going to take one on and we advertise that periodically throughout the year with internal mailshots and bulletins. We also ask if someone is using a pool vehicle and it’s an electric vehicle how far they are going because some people don’t seem to think they need to worry about the range, they just think they can go.

What feedback have you had from drivers?

Monica Guise: If you get drivers into the latest vehicles, the whole driving experience has come on so much in the last three years that we don’t hear a negative response from anyone who has got into these new vehicles. The technology in the new models offers so much more than it did two or three years ago, it’s come on leaps and bounds.

Adrian Harris: I don’t think there any negatives about the driving performance or experience, it’s the bits around it.

Matt Bristow: With the Mini E trial we did hundreds of thousands of miles and quite a few of those users didn’t want to give the car back. When we get people into the i3 they love the car but it’s that initial barrier to thinking about it. It’s completely about perception rather than reality. It’s about reprogramming people.

Monica Guise: It’s getting them in the cars. Once they’re in the car they’re sold -i the profile of their work fits. If they do less than 100 miles. It’s getting them in the car and once they’ve got in the car they’re bowled over, they don’t want to go back to diesel.

Jo Hammonds: It was about drivers understanding how far they actually drove in a day. You tell them you’ve only got 100 miles in a tank and they say ‘oh I do more than that every day’ but they actually had no idea. Most of them travelled 20—30 miles a day. We’ve never had ours stranded anywhere but they got in the vehicle thinking ‘am I going to make it home?’ so driver education was a big thing in terms of understanding what they’re going to do in a day’s work.

David Oliver: From a company car perspective where you’ve got a driver who has an operational work need in the vehicle but then you’ve got the unknown factor, which is their leisure use of the vehicle, some form of telematics which collates the data over a period of time could quite easily prove to that driver whether that vehicle is right for them or not. Then it gives them a bit of confidence before going into the vehicle. We’ve looked at six months of what they do without us influencing it to say that does or doesn’t work. That’s something we’re looking to do to try and bring them onto the fleet from the point of view of being able to make sure we put it with the right driver at the right time.

What barriers have prevented you from taking up ULEVs?

Jo Hammonds: For many fleets, range anxiety as one of the blockers. For us, it's not an issue - 100 miles a day works for our operation. Our main concern is around the charging. Our drivers take the vans home at night and therefore how do we charge them at that local residence safely or even fund that? The actual technology in the vehicle itself is almost there for us. Even the costings work well, certainly within central London where we get the congestion charge benefit of having a ULEV, but it’s actually around the infrastructure which becomes a blocker for us.

Monica Guise: We’ve put charging points across campus. The biggest challenge with smaller fleets, and our fleet is fairly small, is the risk involved. We’ve invested in the past in this technology and it’s not gone well. We’ve had maintenance costs and new battery costs that have cost thousands. For us the big change is leasing companies taking on the risk - suddenly we’ve got confidence to invest.

Paul Taylor: When we reviewed our fleet a few years ago a lot of leasing companies said 'no' to electric vehicles and a lot of the low emission vehicles at that time. But over the last two or three years, we've seen a definite change.

David Oliver: If you don’t get the confidence from the leasing companies how do you say to your business ‘this is the route we’re taking'? With outright purchase you can make that decision but then you might be left with a problem down the line because it’s so much to do with the individual, - where they live, their lifestyle and how that works. You could end up with a very expensive pool vehicle. Confidence from manufacturers is strong, lease companies less so, and that needs to balance up.

Matt Bristow: Until we get the risk-takers and the main leasing companies to take a more bullish view on very low emission vehicles there will always be that slight natural barrier to entry. The incentives are generally geared towards a new car, which is obviously welcome from a manufacturer’s perspective, but you’re not going to unlock that issue in terms of cost to leasing company and perceived risk until there is a decent incentive for the second purchaser. The leasing company is not just taking risk over four years - it's risk over the second life cycle too.

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