Data Insights: a Real-World Example of a Digital-First Approach to Fleet Electrification
By Evgeny Sinkov, Data Scientist
Accurate up-front analysis of a fleet’s operations is critical because it directly impacts the costs and effectiveness of the transition to electric vehicles (EVs). We must consider factors including route types & distances, vehicles, chargers, power demand, payloads and seasonality.
VEV provides decarbonisation analytics and strategies for fleets across various industries, including logistics, waste management, service companies, and public transport. Our approach combines general analytical features with industry-specific metrics to ensure precision and operational resilience.
Case study: analysis of a large and complex UK fleet
Using this highly complex fleet (anonymized for confidentiality) I’m going to illustrate the value gained when we invest in robust data analysis.
Key facts about the fleet :
- Fleet size: 2,200+ vehicles
- Number of depots: 100+
- Vehicle types: various models, ranging from cars to heavy goods vehicles (HGVs)
- Decarbonization target: 2030
- Operational Sites: 500+ locations that form an integral part of the infrastructure where vehicles routinely stop
Challenges and requirements
With EV fleet design, it’s never one-size-fits-all … every fleet is unique and has specific characteristics and business requirements. These were some key considerations for this fleet:
- Depot attachment: vehicles frequently visit multiple depots, with some visiting 5-10 depots in a single day. One depot recorded around 200 visits from unique vehicle in a year. Electrification is easier for vehicles consistently attached to a single depot.
- Operational patterns: the fleet operates in a highly responsive manner, with the company having limited predictability of operations in advance.
- Range limitations: approximately 10% of trips exceed the expected EV range.
Electrification assessment and planning
First we determined the charging requirements of vehicles across all depot visits, identified the pattern of when vehicles visit these depots, and the charging infrastructure that would maximise EV success.
It is important to do the analysis of the charging requirements on the overall fleet rather than at a vehicle-by-vehicle or even depot-by-depot basis, to avoid potential overspend on chargers. Likewise, if we’d only considered average demand, this would have risked under-specifying the infrastructure and causing bottlenecks in vital operations.
We then modelled other characteristics including grid requirements, charger speeds and numbers of chargers. This gives us a baseline to iterate with the Fleet Director and assess strategies that can be deployed to enable a faster rate of electrification.
We’re aiming to strike the right balance between electrifying at a steady rate to protect operational confidence and limit drastic & immediate operational change, and making the switch to electric at a scale that will maximise efficiency, learnings and cost savings.
The overall fleet analysis was a critical factor for this fleet because electrifying by depot only would have necessitated a heavy reliance on public infrastructure to achieve full electrification. We also conducted a location analysis to determine which of the other private locations could be electrified to increase readiness. We found that an additional ~120 sites could be electrified and bring the fleet to near full electrification with significantly less downtime than relying purely on depot charging.
We’ve seen fleets over-invest by as much as 20% through their transition without adequate planning. You need to think about the right mix of vehicles and chargers for your operation, it won’t just be a one-for-one switch.
Roadmap to 100% electrification
Scale matters because the economics are more attractive when depots are fully electrified. Done well, you end up with lower costs, streamlined depots, efficiency gains and happier drivers and passengers.
By constantly refining our approach through feedback from fleet managers, we were able to ensure precise and operationally viable electrification strategies which formed the basis of the roadmap to achieve 100% electrification for this customer.
We speak a lot about being digital-first. As a data scientist, this is my comfort zone, but I hope this case study illustrates to everyone just how tangible the business benefits are if you let your data do the talking.
At VEV, we say that EV fleet electrification must be a digital-first endeavour. And we continue to invest in our software platform, VEV-IQ, to bring more intelligence to our data analysis through machine learning and AI.