Powerful Savings: Navigating the Transition to an Electric Fleet
Electric vehicles are becoming better, cheaper, and more common, but is it time to transition your company’s fleet to electric vehicles? Here at Woop Environmental we’ve gone to EVs to cover our inner-city driving needs. You’ll learn when to implement an electric fleet, how to implement it, and what to do with vehicles you are phasing out.
When to go Electric
This question can be massive and the answer to it varies a lot per industry. We’ll start simply. If you have the money to implement an electric fleet, constantly drive within the same city and the vehicles always return to either the office or a place they can be charged at during the night, you should consider EVs. Now the industry you are in will affect how you go about this. If you are not towing a trailer often then EVs can be a great option. With new additions like the Ford F150 Lighting and brands like Rivian popping up, EVs can carry lots of equipment so unless you are towing things, I wouldn’t be worried. If you are towing, check specific data on the vehicle you are looking at and ensure you do not need to travel more miles than it can handle with the loads you typically tow.
A second concern is charging. We have covered it a little bit already, but I want to ensure you know how to tackle this challenge. You will need to get charging stations at your office or wherever you park the vehicles. Modern EVs can’t just be plugged into an outlet at night and be fully charged in the morning, they simply have too much battery capacity and need some stronger chargers. I recommend you get at least Level 2 charging stations. Implementing a tracking system to ensure vehicles get plugged in each night is a good idea. If you already track whenever a vehicle is taken and returned, just add checkbox to mark that the vehicle is plugged in. If you have stations of adequate level and your vehicles get plugged in each night, you’ll have no problem when it comes to range, and you will see reduced expenses when it comes to powering your vehicles as compared to using gas powered cars.
Implementing an EV Fleet
EVs are expensive and so is the infrastructure to run them, so it is extremely important that you make a good plan to implement a full fleet of them. The first step is testing the vehicles, you can do as many calculations as you want and look at statistics all day but that won’t replace real life experience within your unique business. For small businesses in which the purchase of an EV just to test it is too large of an expense, I recommend you look at rental cars. Rent out an EV for a day or two or ideally a week and see how it works for you. We know already that the cost and emissions are going to be vastly reduced so your only concern when testing is “can the vehicle perform the tasks of our other vehicles in the fleet”, and “is the range on this vehicle enough for the daily task each vehicle has to perform”, if you can answer yes to both then we can get into the finances.
Firstly, you’ll want to calculate how much you are spending on gas per vehicle and how much you are driving, the time you set for this can be any you want whether that’s month, quarter, or year, it does not matter. With these 2 numbers you can get your cost per mile for your current fleet. Make the same calculation by finding the cost per kwh in your area and how many kwh per mile the EV you are looking at gets. Now that you know how much you can save per mile you
