One of our favourite moments from this project came about a year in. A driver who’d dug his heels in at the start, politely but firmly told us he wasn’t interested in an electric car, came back and asked if he could switch early. He’d watched his colleagues’ tax bills shrink and decided he wanted in. Nobody had pushed him. The results had done the talking.
That, in a sentence, is how we like fleet transitions to go. Phased, honest, and led by what actually works for each driver rather than by a sustainability press release.
This is the story of how it played out across an 18-month switch from a fully diesel fleet to a mostly electric one. Names and a couple of identifying details have been changed, but the shape of the project, the numbers, and the lessons are all real.
The client and where they started
The business is a professional services firm in the South East with around 18 staff. Twelve of them had company vehicles as part of their package: mid-size executive saloons for the directors and senior managers, plus a few estates and SUVs for client-facing roles doing big motorway miles.
When they first came to us, all twelve vehicles were diesel, leased through a patchwork of brokers and direct deals, with contracts expiring at different points across an 18-month window. Annual mileage per driver sat between 18,000 and 25,000. Nobody in the business had the time or appetite to manage it all, and the MD was quietly dreading the next renewal cycle.
The trigger for the conversation was simple. One driver had asked about going electric, the finance director had spotted the benefit-in-kind tax gap between diesel and electric company cars, and the MD wanted to know whether a phased switch made sense. Not a “we’re going green” project. A practical question: would this work, and would it save us money or cost us more?
A note on tax figures: company car benefit-in-kind rates for electric vehicles remain low compared with petrol and diesel, but they step up over time. Always confirm current and forthcoming rates with your accountant before you commit.
Wave one: the easy ones first (months 1 to 6)
We started with four vehicles whose contracts were ending first, belonging to drivers who had off-street parking at home, did predictable mixed mileage mostly under 200 miles in a day, and were either keen on the idea or open-minded.
Three went into mid-size electric saloons and one into an electric estate, all on business contract hire. Home charger installations went in the week before each car arrived, organised through a trusted partner.
The surprises in wave one were mostly pleasant. Drivers loved the cars more than expected. The motorway-heavy driver we’d been most nervous about coped fine with a bit of trip planning. The genuinely awkward surprise was charging speed variation at public chargers. On paper, two of the cars supported similar fast DC charging speeds. In the real world, on a cold day at a service station, one of them charged noticeably slower. That sort of thing doesn’t show up in a brochure, and it’s exactly the kind of detail that affects whether a driver enjoys the car or quietly resents it. Our piece on electric car charging and range goes into why this happens.
Wave two: the trickier conversations (months 7 to 12)
The second group of four was less straightforward.
One driver lived in a flat with no off-street parking. One was the heaviest motorway-miles driver in the business, regularly doing 300-mile-plus days. One shared a driveway with a partner who also needed it for their car. And one was simply not keen, and had said so.
Here is where the temptation, if you’re chasing a “100% electric by next year” target, is to push everyone onto an EV anyway and deal with the fallout later. We strongly advised against that. The point of a fleet review is to get each driver into the right vehicle for their life, not to win a badge.
So we did this:
- The flat-dwelling driver moved into an efficient plug-in hybrid as a stepping stone, with workplace charging covering most weekday miles.
- The high-mileage motorway driver went into a long-range EV after a proper week-long extended trial, because we wanted them to feel the route planning in their bones before committing.
- The shared-driveway driver got a smart-charging setup so two EVs could cooperate on one driveway rather than competing.
- The reluctant driver stayed in a diesel for one more cycle. We told him we’d revisit at his next renewal, and left it at that.
A year later, he came back. He’d watched colleagues’ tax bills drop, ridden in their cars, and decided he was ready. That’s the one to remember if you’re worried about resistance from drivers: most of them come round when the people next to them are happily driving the things. They don’t need persuading, they need patience.
Wave three: finishing the job (months 13 to 18)
By the time the final four vehicles came up, the conversation had changed entirely. Drivers were coming to us with specific EV models they’d researched. The finance director had a much better feel for the total cost picture. The MD had stopped dreading renewals because we were handling them.
Three more drivers went into EVs and one into a plug-in hybrid, again based on individual circumstances. We also bridged a short gap for one driver with a short-term lease while we waited for the specific model they wanted.
By month 18, the fleet looked like this:
| Vehicle type | Start of project | End of project |
|---|---|---|
| Diesel | 12 | 1 |
| Petrol | 0 | 0 |
| Plug-in hybrid | 0 | 2 |
| Fully electric | 0 | 9 |
Not a perfect 12-out-of-12 EV result, but a far better outcome: the right vehicle for each driver, no one fighting the policy, and a clear plan for the last two when their circumstances change.
The numbers, honestly
These figures are illustrative of the kind of shift this client saw, rounded and anonymised. Your numbers will be different. If you’d like us to model your own fleet properly, we will.
- Fuel and energy cost per mile: roughly 70% lower across the EV portion of the fleet, driven mainly by home and workplace charging being far cheaper per mile than diesel. For a 20,000-mile-a-year driver, that worked out at savings in the region of £1,800 to £2,400 per car per year.
- Driver benefit-in-kind tax: for a higher-rate taxpayer in a mid-spec executive EV, the annual BIK bill came down by roughly £3,000 to £4,000 compared with the equivalent diesel. Two drivers wrote to thank the finance director, which apparently doesn’t happen often.
- Service and maintenance: noticeably lower on the EVs, although some of those costs are deferred rather than removed. Tyres in particular are something to budget for, EVs go through them faster.
- Upfront costs we were upfront about: home charger installations (one per driver who needed one), two workplace charging points at the office, and a modest investment of management time. All factored into the business case from day one.
- Downtime: across 18 months, one vehicle was off the road longer than expected, due to a parts delay rather than anything EV-specific. The business genuinely barely noticed the transition.
A line you can check what charging actually costs against if you want to model your own situation.
The MD’s summary, paraphrased: it saved them real money, but the bigger win was that vehicle renewals stopped being a job he had to think about.
What we’d do differently next time
Build home charger surveys into the very first conversation. Not when a driver “decides” they want an EV, but as soon as electrification is even on the table. A couple of our installations were tighter on timing than they needed to be. Now we get surveys moving in the background from day one.
Run extended trials for the motorway drivers, not just test drives. A 30-minute spin around a dealership tells you almost nothing about whether you can live with an EV on a 300-mile day. A week with the car tells you everything. The high-mileage driver in wave two had a proper extended trial and made the switch with confidence. We now build this in as standard for any driver doing serious motorway miles.
Resist the urge to model the average driver. The biggest mistake fleet-wide EV plans make is assuming a typical driver and a typical use case. There isn’t one. Twelve drivers meant twelve slightly different conversations, and the project worked because we didn’t try to shortcut that. If we’d built a “fleet policy” up front, we’d have got it wrong for at least three of them.
What this means for your business
If you run a small or medium-sized business with a handful of vehicles, you don’t need a sustainability consultant and a six-figure project plan. You need someone who’ll sit down with you, understand how your business actually uses its vehicles, and help you make the right call for each driver, one contract at a time.
That’s what we do. We work with a limited number of clients on purpose, because this kind of work needs proper attention rather than a quote churned out by a call centre.
If you’d like to talk it through with someone who’ll get to know your business properly, we’re easy to reach. No hard sell, no pressure, no obligation.
