GE Capital is to purchase 25,000 electric vehicles, 10,000 of which will be made available to its fleet customers.

GE is the UK’s tenth largest lease company, according to the latest FN50, with some 45,704 vehicles on its books.

It also has an internal UK fleet in excess of 1,000 cars.

Now it plans to replace around 12,000 saloon/sedan cars in its internal world fleet over to Vauxhall Ampera/Chevrolet Volts over the coming three years. This will include its UK fleet cars, although it is not yet known how many will be EVs by 2014.

GE has already signed the contract with GM for the supply of the electric cars, which have a 1.4-litre petrol engine to recharge the battery giving them a range in excess of 500km.

Negotiations for the supply of the remaining 12,000 electric cars are underway with other OEMs, including Nissan and Renault who are both planning to launch pure EVs here next year.

The number of EVs that GE supplies to its fleet customers will depend on demand. However, access to thousands of the Ampera range extender EVs will put GE in a strong position with fleets who want EVs but do not want to be limited by pure EVs’ lack of range.

GE will start taking delivery of the GM vehicles by the end of the year, adding other EVs as manufacturers expand their portfolios. 

Of course GE is not just a major vehicle lease company. It makes technology that touches every point of the electric vehicle infrastructure and is one of the leaders in the transformation to a smarter electrical grid.