Electric Vehicles and Your Fleet

This blog is designed to be a real-world look at what it actually takes to transition a commercial fleet to electric vehicles. We've noticed in our observations of the industry that a great many commentators in this arena are incentivised by, or benefit directly from, the positive steer towards electric. That doesn't make them wrong, but it does mean the advice often comes with an agenda.

Our view is more grounded. EV may be right for your business, but the reasons for adopting it should not be purely legislative. The decision needs to consider the business in its own right and ensure the transition is well thought out and genuinely suitable for the unique function of that business. It's also worth saying plainly that modern dealerships and OEM's are heavily pushed into selling electric products under net zero restrictions and EV mandates where vehicles that, particularly in the commercial realm, are not yet comparable with their diesel equivalents. This blog will talk through which solutions are actually viable and how to adopt them sensibly into your fleet.

First things first: EV is not for everyone

Commercial vehicles as a whole have many specific applications that can benefit hugely from a transition to electric. There are financial incentives such as fuel savings and there's adherence to net zero and other carbon-footprint frameworks, which matters a great deal for businesses competing on public service tenders or trading on green credentials.

But there are plenty of applications where electric simply doesn't work. Logistics, traffic management, construction and food spring to mind. There are always exceptions depending on super-urban usage, but as a rule of thumb these industries currently struggle to adopt the product. The unpredictable nature of business often makes adoption of lower range, harder to charge vehicles borderline impossible, or at least not without their headaches. The honest starting point is to accept that EV has a place, it just isn't every place.

Start with the infrastructure, not the van

Before you look at a single vehicle, the first questions surround infrastructure. If your business doesn't already have charging points and certainly not a DC (rapid charge) one, you need to work out how you're going to charge your fleet. It's about how you charge these vehicles to be genuine workhorses for your business.

If you only want to run one electric van that isn't doing heavy mileage, a single charger on a standard 7-22kW speed may well be sufficient, and a slower charge could suit. The cost of this isn’t crazy at circa £750-£1500, and there is very little upgrades required usually to the site capabilities. But if you intend to run multiple electric vehicles, the question becomes how you keep all of them full and ready to go when they're needed. That's a very different proposition.

The UK's public charging infrastructure has improved, but it tends to be expensive with very little saving versus diesel, especially at service stations. Reliability of public infrastructure is iffy at best, and whilst apps such as Zap-Map are essential for all EV users, this only helps some element of charger navigation. It's also usually impractical unless you happen to be stationed right next to a supermarket, or your business park or industrial estate has already fitted charging into its central nucleus to rely on this as a consistent and regular charging solution. Upgrading your own infrastructure internally is a costly exercise and should never be done without proper consideration of where and when you'll see the benefit. DC chargers are expensive costing £3,000-£8,000 and this excludes potential costly upgrades to the infrastructure for the area. The requirements and expense of such can be extensive and extortionate. In older buildings or more rural complexes, there may not be any capability to upgrade the site.

There are a number of consultants in this domain who can help, and we'd strongly advise working with them. Just go in with your eyes open: even the “hassle-free, no-obligation” inspections will usually carry caveats designed to secure your loyalty. Octopus Energy have become a market leader in this domain, but there are many other reputable businesses who can help. Keeping costs down, ensuring relevant checks to the local infrastructure are assessed, and ensuring some element of future proofing of the solutions and checking credibility all matter before you commit to upgrading.

For businesses in newer premises, the capability of the site is often much better. Where you rent, a conversation with your landlord about uprating the electricity supply or fitting an EV charger usually goes down well. You're investing in their property, after all.

The part people forget: your handbook and company rules

Future-proofing your infrastructure also means future-proofing for your employees and that opens up the next consideration: business rules, compliance and the company handbook. A surprising amount of paperwork needs revisiting around how you operate.

Take a real example. One of our customers installed two electric chargers and quickly found employees charging their own personal cars at them, with regular squabbles over which vehicle took priority. Plenty of people had adopted EVs successfully for personal use, but the temptation to charge at work, where the electricity is perceived as free, is very high. Left unmanaged, that causes debates, challenges, and ultimately a lack of utilisation of the company vehicles the chargers were installed for.

So reviewing the company handbook and procedures really matters. On-site charging of personal vehicles can be encouraged, but depending on headcount it may be impossible to manage effectively, in which case it may be best to remove the option of charging personal vehicles on site altogether.

Home charging and the expense problem

Personal usage of vans is another area that trips businesses up, particularly where engineers take vehicles home. Firstly, fitting a home charger is likely to be a cost the business absorbs and at £750-£1500 for a standard charger, this is a capital outlay that will be linked to staff reliability, performance, and expected retention period with the business. It can’t exactly be removed easily if they leave!

The incentives and expense reclaims around home charging often aren't well thought out, and that has created real challenges for businesses we work with. Being able to claim back only a minimal home charging amount can leave an employee out of pocket on a vehicle they didn't choose to run.

The process implemented for mileage claims matters here. If you drive a company-owned electric vehicle, you can't use the standard flat per-mile allowance. Instead you claim back the electricity cost using HMRC's advisory electricity rates, currently home charging is 7 pence per mile and public charging is 15 pence per mile. Yet the actual cost of public charging is typically 21 to 24 pence per mile, so the driver ends up absorbing the difference. That means tracking mileage and calculating the total in a manual reclaim method is the most viable option, but arduous in terms of paperwork and administration.

Many drivers have become used to the combustion-engine world, where a fuel card is simply treated as a benefit in kind at a fixed rate, advantageous to the individual, or where a straightforward per-mile reclaim is used. EV introduces an added nuance and an added admin burden. This also creates a disadvantage vs combustion fuel treatment for drivers who have to date, been in a diesel or petrol vehicle. So think carefully: how will your drivers charge when the vehicles aren't on site? What protocols ensure they charge before they run out? How will you manage their grievance regarding the removed benefit of fuel incentives for combustion LCV's?

There's a related lesson from before EV's even arrived. One of the most common problems with company fleets where engineers take vehicles home was extra maintenance cost from skipped daily inspection checks. Aside from maintenance, these created increased downtime of fleet vehicles. Electric adds a further layer; charge protocols, that must sit in the company handbook and fleet guidance and be an area on the radar of your fleet manager or individuals responsible for company vehicles. If an employee runs out of charge or forgets to charge overnight, what happens?

Vehicle selection and the residual value problem

Choosing the vehicle is a challenge in its own right. There are some very good options in the market with a growing presence of well-performing Chinese manufactured vehicles, but aside from the individual vehicle selection, the acquisition method needs care. EV's should be held over a shorter period than combustion vehicles and always with some form of RV-backed product.

We've seen plenty of electric vehicles crash through the floor on resale because the technology moved on. The first-generation electric Sprinter, which retailed around £50,000, was going through auctions at one to two years old for under £20,000 and regularly struggling to sell even then, largely due to the very dated range capability of 78-91 miles by the time the vehicles were resold. An asset that nobody wants used and that's genuinely hard to shift, creates a real problem for the fleet manager. Many are sold at a significant loss, and residual values become very hard to predict because the product's success is so tightly linked to legislation in a world that seems to change by the day.

The lesson is not to gear your fleet purely around incentives and government requirements. Make the vehicle work for you as a workhorse first. As a rule, two-to-four-year terms are advisable on electric, and the procurement method should be a lease, contract hire or operating lease. Where the vehicle is more likely to be damaged, factor in damage recharges as an added nuance or potentially avoid this solution for this application. A Finance Lease is not advisable as the residual risk still sits with you and not the funder.

Our guidance is that any electric purchase should be carefully thought out. On initial implementation, part of the fleet may sensibly stay combustion, while the urban-focused vehicles with consistent, predictable routes go electric. Where there's a higher drain on the battery such as with conversions, whether chassis-derived or van-derived, extra thought is needed. Some applications still benefit despite that drain, such as smaller, lower-mileage, stop-start routes, but this does narrow the niche for the right vehicle.

Range, range anxiety, and how it's actually driven

It's difficult to declare exactly where the successes lie, because manufacturers are working through different generations of vehicle. It's now not uncommon to see commercial vehicles offering over 200 miles, which is a very real and usable figure.

EV enthusiasts will urge you to stop focusing on treating EVs in the same way as combustion engines where you panic to fill up when the vehicle goes on to the red and flashes to say 25 miles remaining and instead look at the total mileage and plan stops within that. We'd agree, to a point. It's rare for a fleet to be constantly covering over 150 miles a day, so 150 miles of range is, in theory, suitable. But there has to be allowance for the unusual day, the different route, the longer journey, or the heavy footed driver. Range anxiety should be treated a little differently from combustion, but it still has to be considered, because your drivers are responsible for the vehicles and their opinions, compliance, and amenability are integral to the success of EV adoption.

Driving style is the other recurring theme. The most common feedback we hear is that drivers don't achieve the published ranges and by and large that's because they're handling an EV exactly as they'd handle a combustion vehicle. That's not how you drive electric. Regenerative braking is essential to getting the most from the vehicle and bringing in a driver trainer to work with your team is, frankly, a must. Many people in the automotive sector have had ample manufacturer training and wrongly assume everyone else has the same instincts behind the wheel. In reality, range can change massively depending on who's driving.

So, does EV work?

Absolutely. EV is a great solution and can be a genuine cost-saver for the right fleet. It's perfect for businesses looking to tick specific boxes and achieve a real low-carbon footprint, ideal for businesses who supply public sector audiences, future-proofing and green credentials. But the cost of going full EV has to be weighed up honestly, and the sensible approach is to identify the routes and areas of the business where electric will genuinely work.

Electric vehicles have a place and a future. It should be remembered, though, that they are largely governed as success stories because of the legislative benefits attached to them. All it would take is a change of government and a scrapping of net zero policy for these vehicles to have to stand on their own two feet, at which point residual values could become highly volatile. New technology such as solid-state batteries adds to that risk, because today's technology could look dated and obsolete very quickly, becoming unwanted and difficult to dispose of.

The life-cycle question

People worry about the life cycle of EVs, so it's worth covering. It's become something of a red herring among manufacturers and dealers, because it's an awkward position. An EV LCV can now be bought for as little as £20k+VAT now, but its residual value depends entirely on the life of the battery. Most OEMs provide a 7 or 8 year battery warranty, and that single fact reshapes the vehicle's whole life cycle.

Consider how combustion engines have lived through multiple cycles: the first three-to-four years with the original owner, then sold on to a main dealer, then to a new customer, then to a garage, and so on until the vehicle can no longer pass an MOT or is fit only for parts. Electric vehicles don't have that same luxury. When the battery goes and is no longer viable, the vehicle is effectively worth nothing because repairing the battery usually costs more than the vehicle's residual value. That makes it worthless as a functioning vehicle and unsuited to a longer life cycle.

Where we regularly see cars at fifteen or twenty years old, an EV will reach the end of the road when its battery does. There are many examples of batteries lasting longer than the warranty period  but when you're managing a fleet's risk properly, it's difficult to plan for a life much beyond that period and prudent to assume that if a battery can die at the end of its warranty, then the consideration should be that it will do. That effectively pulls residual values down to zero at the end of the warranty period, which in turn lifts the monthly cost, because funders have to set residuals accordingly as a prudent business would. It all amplifies the same point: procure electric vehicles via a lease, but understand that the monthly rentals are likely to be higher (despite incentives) than an equivalent combustion engine vehicle.

In summary

A lot of the above may feel a bit negative, and that isn’t the intention. These are considerations to take when implementing EV and how much they matter varies as a result of various factors. For a small business with a handful of vehicles, this is far easier to introduce, employees are more likely to stay, home charging makes more sense and the EV becomes an intrinsic, manageable part of the operation. It's simply an extra element to plan for, across both infrastructure and employee procedures.

The good news is that the lower demand and higher supply (manufacturers must hit a zero-emission van target of 24% of sales in 2026, rising again in 2027) does provide incredible discounts and incentives to move over to electric vehicles. These incentives can often outweigh the impact of residual values on lease rentals making them financially a good option. If the prep work is already done with regards to infrastructure, we at Automotivate can help with getting a great deal for you.

We hope this gives you some real insight into where and how electric vehicles fit into your business. Is there a home for them? Absolutely, but the infrastructure, the needs of the individual business, and all the nuances in between have to be considered, whether you run a large fleet or a small one, the considerations vary.

We're here to help. Not to advise on rewiring your premises or the infrastructure itself, but to help you work out the right next steps for your fleet. It can feel like a daunting journey, but following the right steps will give you the right answer for your fleet.

If you want tailored advice, email leasing@automotivate.co.uk or call 01865 20 30 40. If you are comparing pricing right now, view our latest leasing offers.

Published by Dominic Ilbury. Published on 24th June 2026. Last reviewed on 24th June 2026.