Hugo Seymour, head of customer strategy at Hitachi ZeroCarbon, discusses challenges and opportunities in the transition to electric vehicles.

As electric vehicles become more available – and the deadline to the end of conventional vehicle sales approaches – fleets are readier than they have ever been to adopt. At Hitachi Zero­Carbon, we are seeing this on the van and bus side, but also increasingly with truck fleets. We have learned this as principal partner in Electric Freightway, an inno­vation programme we are working on with Gridserve that is exploring electri­fication of heavy-duty vehicles – and particularly the long-haul routes. We work mainly with depot-based fleets – where bringing EVs into a depot creates a concentrated demand for power, which can be an engineering and cost challenge for the fleet, on top of the cost of the vehicles. Our solutions help fleets work within these constraints to deliver reli­able operations and the best possible total cost of ownership.

Time to get ready

We think that everyone should be explor­ing electrification today. That doesn’t have to mean buying lots of electric vehicles, but it does mean at least looking at the strategy element and doing some modelling and assessment that analyses how the fleet would cope if EVs accounted for 10% or 20% of the total number of vehicles.

That would mean asking questions about which routes worked best, where the chargers would be positioned, how much power would be required – there’s a lot to consider. And then it’s important to project that forward to 50, 60, 70%, all the way up to 100% EV fleet. The other side is considering which parts of the operation could be run with EVs today – and working out how to get to the first 10% or 20%. Because even if you’ve done the strategy work, until you’ve actually started running EVs, it’s very difficult to know whether the paper exercise is going to pan out as reality or whether it’s going to be slightly different.

Help at hand

One thing we’ve done to help fleets around the cost challenges is to create a financing approach – and one of the success stories here has been a collaboration with First Bus. We’re managing battery health and charging for 1,500 of its electric buses across the UK, but we’re also providing financing for 1,000 batteries to go into its fleet, under a co-investment model. First Bus thought about doing everything itself, but that would involve arranging the financing, buying the charge points, paying for the grid infrastructure, buying the vehicles and then managing that end-to-end. That would mean it would essentially be owning all of the technol­ogy risk across all of the elements that are being managed.

A good example of how we take on end-to-end complexity and manage it on behalf of the fleets is our work with Posten Bring, in Norway. It’s the equiva­lent of the UK’s Royal Mail and the mixed fleet has a lot of electric vans, but it is just starting to ramp up in electric trucks. We’re managing charging across both vehicle classes. So we’re proactively monitoring, through our system, all of the different connections of the charge points to the vehicles and making sure that they’re working as expected.

Sharing is caring

The work with First Bus has also led to advantages for other fleets. Most of the buses are out doing their routes during the day, but the depot might have 100-odd high-power chargers that are sitting largely unused. That’s a great opportunity for fleets that are starting out in their electri­fication journey and who don’t want to – or can’t – invest heavily in their own infras­tructure. It provides them with access to a viable charge point for infrastructure shar­ing. First Bus has opened up to the likes of other local fleets, which then don’t have to rely on public charging or invest in their own depot infrastructure. They can guarantee they will get a charge point when they need it, at a more attractive rate than public charging.