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Businesses should “pick the lower hanging fruit first” when it comes to adoption of electric vehicles (EVs), FleetCheck is urging.

The fleet management software company says that easy wins are important when it comes to starting the process of electrification.

Peter Golding, managing director, said: “Fleets that are hanging back from starting to acquire EVs are quite often reticent because there are problems surrounding particular drivers and their vehicles, such as issues with vans being charged by drivers overnight. In some cases, this seems to bring about an inertia around the whole subject.

“However, our message to these businesses is to go for the lower hanging fruit first. In almost every fleet we have seen, there are instances where EV adoption is relatively easy and fleets should make those changes first and make them quickly. It is very much a matter of getting the ball rolling.”

In most cases, he added, the easiest drivers to swap into EVs were car users who had their own off-road parking and covered a predictable amount of mileage every day.

“These employees can have a charger installed and any EV with a sufficient range will meet their needs. In most companies, these people soon become enthusiastic advocates for electrification and spur on other potential users.

“However, even in parts of your fleet that may look like difficult areas for electrification, there will probably be opportunities for positive change, even if the transformation of your fleet is slowed. For example, operators of electric vans are often struggling to resolve problems with issues around payload, range and availability of home charging but there will probably be drivers who can work around those problems.

“It’s very much a case of where there is an opportunity for easy change, make that change. You are going to have to electrify your fleet and do so within a relatively short window, so do the easy work first in order to create momentum.

“In terms of ballpark figures, it is probable on many fleets that switching the final 20% of the fleet to electric power could be as difficult as the first 80% but that should not prevent you from getting the process underway. It’s very much a case of, for the moment, not letting the perfect be the enemy of the good.”

The adoption of hydrogen as a source of fuel for net zero road transport is “lagging way too far behind electricity,” FleetCheck is warning.

The fleet management software company says that visible signs of progress are almost non-existent and that Government strategy appears to be drifting.

Peter Golding, managing director, said: “The Government’s hydrogen strategy, released last year, stated that hydrogen would have a key role to play in road transport in the future but how that would develop was unclear. It’s difficult to know what is meant by that.

“Other European countries are seeing substantial action at an infrastructure level – with a new commitment to a tenfold increase in electrolyser manufacturing capacity by 2025 by the European Commission in partnership with private enterprise – but there is little comparable action here.

“What seems to be happening is that current strategies and funding in the UK are directed almost entirely towards vehicle electrification. Of course, the attention that is being given to the EV transition is laudable but hydrogen has an important or even crucial role to play and is simply being allowed to lag way too far behind.”

It was already apparent, Peter said, that hydrogen had the potential to be the fuel of choice when it came to commercial vehicles above around three tonnes.

“There are unresolved questions surrounding electrification in this part of the market including the massive batteries that would be needed to operate larger commercial vehicles and the impact on charging times and facilities, as well as much-reduced payload.

“Hydrogen has the potential to solve these problems and the first larger vans are now starting to enter production but the refuelling infrastructure to support them in the UK, especially in terms of green hydrogen, is almost non-existent. Unless you are a return-to-base fleet that installs its own refuelling facilities, the potential for adoption is very, very low.

“The fact is that a massively upgraded refuelling infrastructure, concentrating first on urban areas and motorways, is urgently needed. Even if we could work towards a hundred hydrogen stations over the next couple of years, that would be a major step forward.”

Peter added that it was interesting to look at the case of JCB, which had concluded that electrification was largely unsuitable for its own production vehicles and was forging ahead with its own hydrogen strategy.

“They are taking an ultra-pragmatic approach, with the use of hydrogen in converted ICE engines being the first step, before later moving to fuel cell models. This seems like a sensible approach that also maps out how fleets could move to hydrogen. Indeed, there is a parallel for taking this route in fleets in the recent past with the use of LPG in vans.”

Advanced machine learning techniques are being used by FleetCheck to bring about what the company describes as its number one enhancement request from users of fleet management software.

The technique – which use data to improve how a system performs a repetitive task over time – is being applied to create a new methods of easily importing information from paper and PDF documents.

Peter Golding, managing director, explained that avoiding retyping details from paper or scanned such as invoices, fuel receipts and checksheets were the most common wish from its customer base when asked what they would like to see from products in the future.

He said: “One of the major barriers which make it hard to fully digitalise company car, van and truck management processes is that many fleet suppliers still use paper-based systems or scanned PDF documents and images rather than easily imported, structured data.

“Ideally, our users would like to be able to scan these pieces of paper or import these PDF files and the software then identify what the document represents before automatically importing the relevant information into the right-field of their system.

“At present, we don’t know of any fleet software that can do this. It is a really tough coding problem, meaning that the software would have to be able to identify an invoice, for example, and then draw the relevant figures in the right places.

“There are difficult obstacles here. How does the system know which are the figures for the invoice subtotals and total and which are other numbers on the page that have no direct relevance, such as the postcode or the phone number?”

FleetCheck’s team are trailing a solution using machine learning models for common documents to solve these issues, he added.

“We’re seeing some success and envisage our system soon being as accurate as a human entering data and much faster. It’s a step change that will bring real benefits to our customers and represents a small revolution in terms of what fleet management software can do.

“Following several years looking at this area, our aim is to bring something to market later in 2022 that will deliver at least some of the benefits that we know fleets are seeking. It’s an exciting moment.”

New record pump prices for diesel – already wiping out the Government’s recent reduction in duty – mean fleets need to continue their focus on fuel management, FleetCheck says.

Businesses sometimes had a tendency to become accustomed to high prices quite quickly, explained Peter Golding, managing director at the fleet software company, but a proactive approach to fuel purchasing and use needed to be maintained.

He said: “The fuel duty reduction caused a short term fall in pump prices but they are now back above previous highs, showing that upwards pressure remains. Further help from the Government seems unlikely in the short term at least, so it is very much down to fleets to keep pursuing fuel fundamentals.

“What’d we’d underline is that we’re definitely seeing results from the fleets with which we work that have adopted basic fuel management strategies over the last few months in response to rising fuel prices. They are not able to neutralise the increases entirely, of course, but they are able to minimise their impact.

“Core measures such as adopting a fuel card, controlling where purchasing is taking place, inhibiting fraud and monitoring driver fuel consumption are all having a positive effect for businesses. This is an issue that can be managed successfully with a proactive attitude, something that we are consistently able to see through our software.”

Peter added that the ongoing high price of fuel was also prompting some of FleetCheck’s customer base to speed up the electrification of their cars and vans.

“High and rising fuel prices can sometimes substantially change the whole life cost profile of operating diesel and petrol vehicles and, while electricity prices are also increasing, the effects on overall calculations are relatively minimal.

“Certainly, we talk to fleets who see the current pump prices as a major factor – perhaps the major factor – when it comes to accelerating electrification. Alongside all the many quantifiable arguments, filling up a mainstream company car and finding that the bill is nudging £100 has a definite psychological effect.”

The process of switching to electric cars and vans is starting to prompt a move to leasing among small-medium enterprises (SMEs), FleetCheck is reporting.

Peter Golding, managing director at the fleet software company, explained that the high purchase price of electric vehicles (EVs) was a primary factor in causing many business of this size to reconsider their acquisition method.

He said: “We have a large number of SMEs in our user base and, especially at the smaller end of the scale, vehicle acquisition is often relatively ad hoc. This doesn’t mean it isn’t taken seriously but there is not the same kind of structured approach seen in larger fleets.

“When businesses have cash available, they will often outright purchase, but will also take out loans or leases at different times. It often just depends on the particular car or van, the driver and the moment.

“However, the relatively high purchase price of EVs looks as though it is starting to change this approach, according to feedback we are hearing. While businesses generally recognise that whole life costs for EVs are comparable to petrol and diesel equivalents, the upfront costs are something of a concern.”

Peter said that leasing was already popular among SMEs but that momentum did seem to be growing around further use, especially when it came to EVs.

“Leasing circumvents the problems of upfront costs and provides regular payments over a period of time, plus it also removes any residual value worry. This is an issue because some SMEs perceive that current EVs will be superseded by better models in the medium term.

“Also, there is a general degree of worry about the shape of the economy and leasing means that businesses can keep more money in the bank for a longer period of time, providing a higher degree of liquidity if problems do arise.

“Of course, if we see a price realignment for EVs in the medium term that makes purchase prices lower, this trend might reverse but, especially among the more expensive, longer range EVs favoured by fleets, this seems relatively unlikely.”