The fleet software specialist highlights that firms will have problems measuring the cost of charging the vehicle unless they are only ever charged from a public, office or depot based dedicated charging point.

Managing director Ashley Sowerby said: ‘It is a central tenet of effective fleet management that all costs should be measured. Even if charging an electric vehicle is only a matter of a few pounds, it still needs to be accurately recorded.

‘The fact is that, unless you use a dedicated charging point that has some form of individual metering, it is very difficult to measure the cost of charging an electric vehicle. Certainly, we are unaware of any car that will tell you an individual charge figure in kwh.’


The issue was even more acute when it came to vehicles that were charged at home by electric car and van drivers, Sowerby added.

He said: ‘If a driver uses their own EV on work business, then Revenue and Customs suggest using the full AMAP rate of 45 pence per mile but if an employee plugs a company car into their domestic power supply, how do you work out what it has cost for them to charge the vehicle? Certainly it won’t be obvious from their domestic power bill.

‘Compared to the levels of reimbursement that are needed if you were looking at an average petrol or diesel car that may be around £80 per tank, the numbers are very small but they obviously still need to be accurately tracked from the point of view of both reimbursement and whole-life costs.

‘This is probably not an insurmountable problem but another one of several that need to be overcome if fleets are to adopt EVs in large numbers.’