Fleet Electrification: It's Happening Now — Are You Ready?

The UK's ZEV Mandate means 80% of new cars and 70% of new vans must be zero-emission by 2030. For fleet operators, the question isn't whether to go electric — it's how to get it right.

In my fleet decarbonisation work, I see the same concerns everywhere: Do we have enough electrical capacity? How do we handle drivers who charge at home? Are the vehicles actually ready? What about the costs?

The Questions Every Fleet Manager Is Asking

These aren't unreasonable concerns. Fleet electrification is genuinely complex — it touches procurement, infrastructure, IT, HR, and operations simultaneously. The operators who are struggling aren't struggling because they lack ambition. They're struggling because they're approaching a systems challenge as a vehicle replacement exercise.

The most common mistakes I see:

• Underestimating infrastructure lead times. Grid connection upgrades can take 12–24 months. If you haven't started the conversation with your DNO, you're already behind.
• Ignoring driver behaviour. A fleet can have the best charging infrastructure in the country and still underperform if drivers aren't engaged. Home charging reimbursement policies, app adoption, and communication matter enormously.
• Treating all vehicles the same. A 200-mile daily delivery van has completely different electrification requirements to a pool car used for 30-mile commutes. Segmenting your fleet by duty cycle before selecting vehicles is non-negotiable.
• Overlooking smart charging. Without smart charging, you're paying peak-rate electricity for the bulk of your fleet's energy. The cost delta over a year across a large fleet is significant.

What Good Looks Like: Lessons from Optimise Prime

The Fleet Electrification Guide from Optimise Prime — produced from the world's largest commercial EV trial, involving Royal Mail, British Gas, Hitachi Energy, Uber, and UK Power Networks — is the most practically useful resource I've come across for fleet managers navigating this transition.

What I value about it is the grounding in real operational data rather than vendor projections. It shows how to use existing fleet telematics to identify which vehicles are genuine EV candidates today, how to phase infrastructure investment to manage CAPEX, and why smart charging isn't optional if you want the economics to stack up.

But the section I recommend most is the one on people. Getting buy-in across Operations, IT, Procurement, and HR isn't a soft skill — it's a delivery risk. The organisations that have executed fleet transitions well treated change management with the same rigour as the technical planning.

The Case for Moving Now

With 10 million EVs projected by 2035 and regulations tightening year on year, the companies moving now will have a material advantage over those still waiting. Grid connection queues are growing. Charging infrastructure suppliers are at capacity. The first-mover window is closing.

The organisations that started planning in 2022 are deploying today. The organisations starting now will deploy in 2026–27. The ones that wait another year may find themselves fighting for grid capacity and contractor bandwidth in a very congested market.

Where to Start

If you're at the beginning of this journey, the most valuable thing you can do is conduct a proper fleet audit — duty cycle analysis, home charging feasibility by driver postcode, depot power capacity assessment. That data shapes every decision that follows.

If you're mid-journey and hitting obstacles — infrastructure delays, driver resistance, cost overruns — the causes are almost always traceable to gaps in one of those three areas.

I've spent the last several years working on exactly these challenges, both in delivery and in building the frameworks and standards that make delivery repeatable. If you're working through a fleet electrification programme and want to talk through the specifics, feel free to get in touch.