Before You Buy a Single EV, Read Your Fleet’s Own Data

Fleet electrification usually starts with a vehicle order and ends with a surprise. A depot that cannot charge twelve vans overnight. A route that worked in September and fails in January. A driver who loses forty minutes at a public rapid charger because the schedule assumed a full battery. Almost none of that is a vehicle problem, and almost all of it was visible in the data you already hold.

Most operators have three to five years of GPS traces, ignition events and odometer readings sitting in their telematics platform. That history answers the only question worth asking first: which of these vehicles could have run on a battery last year, on the days they actually worked?

The question most fleets answer backwards

The common approach is to pick a model, check its quoted range, and compare that number with the fleet’s average daily mileage. Both figures flatter the plan. Quoted range comes from a test cycle with no load, no hills and mild weather. Average daily mileage smooths away the days that decide whether a driver finishes the round.

Turn it around. Start with the duty cycle each vehicle already performs, then ask which drivetrain covers it with margin to spare. That ordering costs nothing, uses data you have paid for since the day the trackers went in, and it produces a shortlist you can defend to a finance director.

Four numbers your telematics already holds

Pull these per vehicle, over at least twelve months so that winter is included.

The readout that matters:

• Daily distance at the 95th percentile, not the mean. The tail is what strands a driver.
• Depot dwell between the last drop and the first morning departure, which is your real charging window.
• The longest single leg with no stop over two minutes, which sets the minimum usable battery.
• Energy proxies: sustained motorway speed, altitude change from the GPS trace, and idle hours where the engine runs a tail lift, chiller or crane.

Those four columns sort a mixed fleet into three groups quickly. Vehicles that never come close to the limit and can move now. Vehicles that clear it on most days but not all, where a depot charger or a route change closes the gap. Vehicles whose duty cycle genuinely needs a different fuel for the time being, and which should stay where they are rather than becoming an expensive lesson.

Averages hide the days that break the plan

A van averaging 96 km a day sounds comfortable for any modern electric model. The same van doing 240 km on the four busiest days of the month, in traffic, with a chiller running, is a different proposition. Cold weather adds to it: below freezing, real-world range falls noticeably, and cabin heating runs hardest on exactly the stop-start urban work that electric drivetrains otherwise suit best.

Plan against the worst week in your data, not the median day. A fleet that only works on paper in June will be back on diesel by February.

This is where geofencing and trip history earn their keep. If you can see that the long days cluster around two customers on the edge of the region, the fix might be a route rebalance rather than a smaller battery or a bigger budget.

Your depot is the real constraint

Vehicle choice gets the attention; the site usually decides the timetable. Three questions settle most of it.

First, how many vehicles are parked at the same time, and for how long? Dwell data gives you the overlap hour by hour, which tells you whether you need twelve chargers or four used in sequence. Second, what does the grid connection allow? A charger count that exceeds the site supply is a civil engineering project with a lead time measured in quarters, not a purchase. Third, who plugs in, and what happens when they forget? Charging that depends on goodwill fails quietly, and you find out at six in the morning.

Sequenced overnight charging across a shared supply is often the difference between a plan that needs a new substation and one that needs a schedule.

What changes once the fleet is mixed

Running two drivetrains is not the same as running one twice. Dispatch has to know which vehicles can take which work, and the rule cannot live in a supervisor’s head. Maintenance splits into two regimes with different intervals and different parts. Reporting gains a second unit of measure, so cost per kilometre now blends pence per kWh with pence per litre, and comparing depots means comparing both.

The operators who manage this well tend to add one KPI early: energy per drop, tracked per vehicle and per route. It survives the transition, works for both drivetrains, and stops the conversation collapsing into fuel price arguments.

A ninety-day readout before you order anything

Three steps, one quarter:

• Weeks 1 to 4: export twelve months of trip history and build the four-column table above, one row per vehicle. Flag every vehicle whose 95th percentile day exceeds 70% of a candidate model’s realistic winter range.
• Weeks 5 to 8: overlay depot dwell on the same vehicles to size the charging window, then price the site supply against the charger count that window implies.
• Weeks 9 to 12: run a paper trial. Replay last winter’s routes against the shortlist, count the days that would have failed, and decide whether the fix is a charger, a route change or a later start date.

At the end of it you have a phased list with evidence attached, and the first order covers vehicles that were always going to work. That is a far better position than discovering the gap after delivery.

Where Navigatto fits

The transition runs on the same telematics you already use for routing, driver behaviour and maintenance: trip history, dwell reporting, geofencing and custom dashboards that show the numbers side by side for both drivetrains. Nothing exotic is required. The fleets that make electrification look easy are usually the ones that read their own data first.

Ready to see what your duty cycles say about your next order? Book a demo and we will walk through the readout with your fleet’s own history.