Introducing electric vehicles to your fleet is a big change and there will be resistance form drivers. We recommend taking a soft approach by seeding the idea slowly in Step 2.
Step 2- Introduce your staff to electric vehicles via information sessions and experience days.
The first step was to find out how far your fleet travels each day and where are the popular parking spots. While you’re collecting this data, you can start planning ways to introduce your business to electric vehicles in a soft way.
There are a number of ways to do this depending on how you currently communicate with employees. You could find an anti-EV person and arrange for them to drive one for a week. It could backfire, but it rarely does. Most of the time they become an advocate and will make the transition easy by telling everyone how great they are.
It’s also important to let a number of stakeholders drive electric vehicles.
Whenever we speak to a Fleet Manager about the process of fleet electrification, they always get positive feedback on the vehicles. This is because most employees are driving older cars so getting into any new car would be a nice experience. EVs are packed with technology, some luxury and they are completely different to drive. It may not convert them instantly though it should open them to the possibility.
Getting people into EVs can happen a number of ways.
- Talk to a vehicle manufacturer. Most are willing to let you borrow one for several weeks so they can get bums on seats.
- You can hire one. They are available from the several big name rental car companies. There are also many peer to peer rental opportunities.
- Find an EV experience day and invite some colleagues to join you. The NSW government is funding lots of EV experience days in 2022 and 2023 as part of their push to have electric vehicles make up 50% of new vehicle sales by 2030.
It’s also important to combine the driving with some education or information sessions. Some businesses have invited vehicle manufacturers to sales meetings, or tool box talks, to give employees a chance to ask questions while learning about electric vehicles from a trained presenter instead of a negative FaceBook feed or an conspiracy theorist neighbour.
The five steps are:
- Review how many kilometres each vehicle travels during the month and where they go.
- Introduce your staff to electric vehicles via information sessions and experience days.
- Conduct internal surveys to find willing early adopters and identify operational challenges.
- Perform an audit of buildings to determine suitability for EV charging infrastructure.
- Evaluate the available EVs in the market to determine a suitable vehicle.
