Tips for EV Fleet Management

Optimized fleet management ensures your business maximizes its investment in fleet electrification. However, brand-new approaches are required to streamline how you manage your fleet.

As the world’s electric car fleet is expected to reach 17 million units sold in 2024, more businesses will adopt EVs into their fleets. But copy-pasting traditional fleet management techniques isn’t enough to manage EVs. Here’s how to optimize your EV-powered fleet.

Choose the Right Vehicles

Your choice of vehicle will determine how easy or hard your job as a fleet manager is. Just because a particular brand is trendy doesn’t mean it suits your organization.

If you’re one of the 71% of fleet managers adding EVs to your fleet, ask yourself these questions:

·  What is our budget?

·  What’s the range of this model?

·  What’s the vehicle’s payload capacity?

·  Can the payload capacity handle our workload?

·  Is the local charging infrastructure compatible with our vehicles?

These questions are in addition to the usual considerations when purchasing any vehicle type, such as the brand’s reliability and the model’s road performance.

Charging Infrastructure – Private, Public, or Both?

Unfortunately, the EV charging network isn’t widespread enough to make recharging your vehicles as simple as filling up a gas-powered vehicle. From a fleet manager’s perspective, dealing with this problem is essential to getting the most from your fleet.

Analyze the public charging infrastructure in your area and determine whether it’s both available and suitable for your fleet. Likewise, you may want to weigh the pros and cons of building a fully-fledged charging depot or home chargers for employees.

Still, some businesses opt for a combination of public and private charging points to keep their EVs on the road.

Prioritize State of Charge

The electric vehicle market has seen a remarkable surge, with 21% year-on-year growth. Companies driving this change are discovering the new metrics that must be incorporated into their data-driven fleet management strategies. One such data point is state of charge.

State of charge is essentially your EV’s fuel indicator. Fleet managers must examine the state of charge in real time to ensure EVs don’t shudder to a halt at the side of a road. Tracking this metric also enables you to create real-time alerts for things like: 

·  Vehicles not plugged in at the end of a journey.

·  Confirm charging completion.

·  Flag a low EV battery.

Review the Data

Data reviews are essential to every fleet manager’s job, but EV-powered fleets often have additional nuances that make this function even more important. 

Pay special attention to the charging logs to gain actionable insights. Aspects may include charging durations, where each EV is charging, and when it’s charging. What does this data tell you? It lets you optimize a charging schedule, which also influences other functions, including route optimization.

Upgrade to Telematics

Telematics is a fleet manager’s best friend because it tells you everything you need to know about the vehicle and the driver behind the wheel.

Optimization means knowing where your vehicle travels, how long it takes to get there, and how long it spends idle. This enables you to uncover patterns you can act upon to save money and improve your business’s overall supply lines.

Fleet telematics also monitors driver behavior, ensuring that employees act responsibly and can be trained to perform to the highest level.

Compare and Contrast

Finally, an EV fleet is an investment in the future of your business. Fleet management means comparing the “before” and “after” data. During the early stages of electrification, compare your KPIs to that of your gas-powered fleet.

Set aside time each year to compare the KPIs to ensure continuous improvement in your fleet's performance while driving down costs.

Conclusion: Charging Optimization and Saving With Bluedot

Leverage the latest technology to ensure your fleet always has a charging point within easy reach. Bluedot’s real-time data enables fleet managers to track and manage their fleets in real time.

Businesses can also take advantage of Bluedot FleetOS to provide seamless, consistent charging with access to the nation’s largest EV charging payment network. With EV fleet payments managed under a single app, you can automate payment and home charging reimbursement with ease. Discover the benefits of adopting the app for your fleet by visiting Bluedot today.

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