Should the company switch its trucks, cars, and vans to electric? It’s a question that plenty of businesses operating fleets of vehicles—in industries like delivery, health care, cable companies, and utilities—are thinking through.
Eighty-seven percent of fleet operators polled by Cox Automotive last year said they were expecting to bring aboard some battery-powered vehicles in the next five years. Their top concerns weren’t that different from everyday drivers’: Businesses aren’t sure how to keep EVs charged. When time spent charging up the battery—which can take anywhere from 20 minutes to several hours, depending on the vehicle and charger—is time not on the road making money, these decisions can be the difference between ending up in the red or the black.
For six months this year, Ford and an Atlanta-based utility called Southern Company experimented with custom software that could help alleviate these growing pains. The results suggested, the companies say, that just a bit of charging tech smarts could save businesses money by charging in exactly the moments when weather and other customers’ electric grid usage conspires to make prices cheap and electricity most efficient.
Still, the experiment ended after May, and the Southern Company says it has no immediate plans to create a “managed charging” program for its own fleet of electric vehicles, or to offer one to commercial customers.
The experiment highlights the complexities of EV charging—and EV ownership—for businesses for whom time and reliability is money. Company EVs can cost less to own, operate, and maintain, especially as gas prices creep upwards. But the logistics of keeping them charged can seem daunting to managers used to dealing with gas, especially for fleets like Southern Company’s that don’t operate on strict schedules.
A Southern Company truck—this one for Georgia Power—juices up at a Ford Pro charger. Courtesy of Southern Company
In the US, federal subsidies that offered tax breaks for businesses going electric made EVs a particularly appealing choice. But most of those incentive programs are being phased out by the middle of next year, after Congress passed the One Big Beautiful Bill this summer. Fourteen percent of US fleets operated EVs last year, according to Cox Automotive.