Enterprise Fleet Management and Geotab together conducted one of the largest fleet EV Suitability Assessments. By taking action on this data, Enterprise Fleet Management can continue to provide its customers with the industry-leading support they’ve come to expect.
With the impending transition to electric vehicles (EVs) on the horizon and real-world factors informing decision-making, the team at Enterprise Fleet Management recognised the importance of basing their long-term business strategy on reliable data — not assumptions.
The fleet EV Suitability Assessment was designed to better understand how the shift to EVs will affect Enterprise Fleet Management’s business today and in the future.
In all, 91,252 Enterprise Fleet Management leased vehicles were included in the study. The results surprised both teams:
13 per cent (approximately 12,000) of the analysed vehicles could be economically replaced by EVs today.
Near-term electrification could achieve a total potential saving of $45 million and 194,000 tonnes of CO2 emissions over four years.
Up to 45 per cent (approximately 42,000) of the analysed vehicles could be electrified as EV utilities enter the market.
The Challenge: How the shift to EVs will affect fleets
The transition to EVs is underway across North America, a fact not lost on the team at Enterprise Fleet Management. As a leading fleet management provider with more than 649,000 managed vehicles and a presence in over 50 local markets in North America, Enterprise Fleet Management partners with companies, government agencies and organisations operating medium-sized fleets of 20 or more vehicles. The Enterprise Fleet Management team provides industry-leading expertise to customers through local, hands-on account management and personalised support during a vehicle’s full life cycle.
Dain Giesie, Assistant Vice President at Enterprise Fleet Management says the team understands the importance of putting the right pieces in place in the short term to aid in long-term success — and a successful EV transition is top of mind for this forward-thinking team.
“Our goal with this study was to map out what we need to know and what we need to provide our customers now and in the near future so we can continue to be the best fleet management provider possible,” he says.
Enterprise Fleet Management offers total transportation solutions to customers together with their affiliate Enterprise Holdings.
Chris Haffenreffer, Assistant Vice President of Innovation at Enterprise Holdings, says a long-standing relationship with Geotab led to a unique opportunity for the two innovative companies to do something that had never been done before.
“Working together, we started to better understand the big data capabilities Geotab has,” he explains. “We realised that if we could combine Geotab’s analytics with Enterprise Fleet Management’s real-world data on a large scale, we could develop a unique perspective on how we expect our fleet to evolve in the coming years.”
The Solution: Conduct an Electric Vehicle Suitability Assessment
Calling it a large-scale study might actually be underplaying the greatness of what was accomplished, according to Dain Giese. Not only did the study of over 91,000 vehicles allow the team at Enterprise Fleet Management to better understand the market opportunity today, but it also provided valuable insights to further support their customers into the future.
“This wasn’t just a study on vehicle availability today versus tomorrow”, Dain says. “We contributed real-world experience that informed data inputs for depreciation, fuel costs, vehicle costs, after-market costs and more to give us a deeper perspective into our customers’ potential future needs and how we can best support those needs”.
By using aggregated data from Geotab to show how vehicles were being used by Enterprise Fleet Management clients, the two teams were able to produce a factual and reliable suitability assessment on an unprecedented scale.
“Having accurate, real-world data from the fleet helps us reduce as many assumptions as we can for our analysis and projections”, Hani Hawari, Senior EV Product Manager at Geotab says.
Dain Giesie adds the study “highlighted the opportunities and needs of our customers for us, so we could keep our strategic planning process on track and continue to be a fleet management leader for those we serve.”
As Enterprise Fleet Management’s fleet is largely made up of medium-duty work vehicles and utilities, it was interested to learn what data the EVSA could provide to help compare the EV opportunity today versus what the opportunity would be in the near future with the coming wave of commercial EVs.
“Doing this type of analysis across the entire fleet was an enormous opportunity for us,” Chris Haffenreffer says. “We believe that EV pickups (utilities) will play a huge role in the future, but we wanted to use this study to help quantify that opportunity to better understand how EV pickup introductions will impact Enterprise Fleet Management.”
Driving customer success using real-world data
With some of the most robust tools in the industry for understanding total cost of ownership, like Geotab’s EVSA, Enterprise Fleet Management enables customers to make informed decisions for their business by understanding what their fleet costs look like today versus what they’ll look like in the near future.
“This is critical today with ICE vehicles, and the same will be true for EVs,” Dain Giesie says. “Our customers need the right vehicles—and the right number of vehicles—to achieve their business goals.”
Each year, Enterprise Fleet Management re-evaluates its customers’ fleets in addition to looking at different factors like market and business fluctuations, to determine if adjustments need to be made.
“The market and macroeconomic factors change. And you’ve got to have an expert like Geotab that can help you with that every year, or you’re going to miss an opportunity,” Dain adds.
“As more vehicles become connected, and more reliable information is gathered, this type of study can only get better. We’re not in the business of guessing how things will impact our fleet. We want to use real-world data to help our customers any way we can.”
For more information on Geotab, click here.