The rise of hot hatch EVs is creating potential fleet risk management and cost issues, FleetCheck has warned.

EV hot hatches present new risk and costs issues for the fleet sector to manage

Peter Golding, managing director, pointed to emerging “rapid” electric vehicles such as the 650hp Hyundai Ioniq 5N and the 435hp MG4 XPower, both of which cover 0-62mph in around 3.5 seconds.

“Just a few years ago, performance of this type was limited to genuine sports cars and even supercars, and was certainly almost unknown on fleets, so these rapid EV hot hatches do represent something new for the sector to manage.”

Golding noted that EVs were generally faster in terms of acceleration than petrol cars on fleets – and said that to some extent, fleets have so far found this issue has been self-managing.

“If EV drivers have made use of the potential performance of their cars, they’ve found the range falling very rapidly, so have tended to be generally conservative behind the wheel.

“However, with the market is now producing rapid EV hot hatches, providing a very high level of performance at relatively accessible prices, with the XPower being around £36,000, they raise a fundamental question of whether they should be added to fleets?”

Golding also pointed out that alongside the risk issues of drivers attempting to access the available performance on a public road, there would also be cost issues arising from excessive tyre and brake wear.

“Of course, there have been privately owned cars on public roads that go this fast for some years but the numbers have been tiny. The danger is that this represents a new class of attainable vehicle that could be appealing to some fleet drivers.”

And the FleetCheck boss also said there was a fundamental question to be asked about whether anyone driving on company business needed access to this kind of speed – and whether such cars should be added to company choice lists at all.

“From our point of view, the answer would be no and it is difficult to envisage a serious and informed risk management conversation that concludes otherwise.

“However, this does seem like a conversation that the fleet sector needs to be having. Getting this wrong could result in tragedy for fleet drivers and other road users.”