“The biggest one is that EVs catch fire. Then, every single vehicle that’s broken down at the side of the road is an EV, because it’s run out of electricity on every single journey it’s ever done. There are no charge points anywhere and you have to spend two hours sat at one to get 20 miles down the road.”
That is Arval’s senior consultant, Ben Edwards, wearily reciting some tired old electric car twaddle – the types of anecdotes most fleet operators have, by now, probably heard a million times. EVs are far from alone in being sucked into the culture wars, and they are subject to the same black and white extremities of opinion, however heated or ill-informed, as anything else with an incendiary social media base.
A glance at SMMT registration figures (EVs are up 35.2% year-to-date and fleet has a 58.9% overall market share) proves BIK of between 0% (2020-21) and today’s 3% is a more effective influence on drivers than spurious scare stories, but the naysayers still have sway, and should be ignored at your peril.
“You can get a little bit bombarded if you spend any time on social media,” says Caroline Sandall-Mansergh, manager for consultancy and channels at Alphabet. “You may not follow the extreme accounts, but it filters down in slightly softer ways through mainstream media. Some of the facts just get completely abused and they’re not representing real truth – or they’re taking such a narrow view of a very particular use case in very particular circumstances.”
Over the hill
Though EV misinformation is alive and well, some believe its zenith has passed, at least in fleet. A lot of that is because the vehicles and the taxation regime are now better established, while the cabin fever that set in during lockdowns was a breeding ground for the worst of it.
“I think it was really bad just before and after Covid,” says AFP chair Paul Hollick, who adds that the organisation first published a driver Q&A document to counter misinformation around four years ago. “In our world, you were at that infancy of company cars moving to electric, and a lot of people weren’t really investing a lot of time or understanding in what the vehicles could do. At that time, there was almost an anti-EV brigade that wanted to see them fail because people just naturally don’t like change.”
“I was at an OEM at the time and we were communicating 0% BIK,” adds charge point firm Ohme’s director, Peter McDonald, who was Nissan’s fleet boss at the start of the pandemic, responsible for corporate sales of the Leaf electric hatchback. “No one really knew what [percentage] BIK they were paying, so when it went to zero, that wasn’t a number lots of people recognised.
“It was 1 April, we’d gone into lockdown weeks prior… and it was really hard, because there were so many other really odd things going on with Covid. It was kind of, ‘what is this number, how does it make sense and how do you respond to it?’ – and it wasn’t in a vacuum. It was happening in a world with lots of other events.”
Hollick thinks the situation is better than it was then and believes used car buyers are now more in need of an EV education than fleets. Others agree that the edge has come of the nuttiest of the stories as the vehicles have become more popular, but think the residual effect is still in session. Edwards says the “damage is done,” while Sandall-Mansergh suggests we “still feel the echoes of some of the myths at the more ridiculous end of the scale”.
True lies
Then there are the stories, the responses and the practices that, while not necessarily malicious or designed to spread lies, are just plain daft. Edwards points out the softer end – the now-flawed range anxiety quip, often (but not exclusively) from older company car drivers reticent to peel away from petrol and diesel.
“I’ve still got drivers out there who say, ‘I’m never going to choose an EV, because I can’t do my 400-mile journey from Southampton to Scotland in one go’. It’s like, ‘how often do you actually do a 400-mile journey in your petrol or diesel vehicle without stopping, because even if you do, you should be stopping anyway’.”
“It’s incredible how many drivers have an electric vehicle and don’t have any understanding of how to charge it,” adds Hollick. “Normally, when they start, they’ll just run an extension cable out the window. There’s no real forethought. Unfortunately, we don’t work and live in a world where there are lots of people that actually plan properly. Some just select a vehicle because it looks cool and it’s cheap to tax, rather than thinking about the implications of how to actually run it.”
The consensus is that traditional company car drivers and those that have latched onto salary sacrifice now, generally, know the ropes, and that misinformation largely bounces off them. Work remains with drivers whose position means EVs are relatively new and unfamiliar, though.
“What we’re working with now are fleets where it’s job-need drivers or lower grades,” says Edwards. “They’re starting to choose EVs, because they’re getting cheaper and coming onto choice lists, but drivers aren’t well-educated. They’re not going out and doing their research, and we’ve had complaints like, ‘my vehicle’s not fit for purpose because, as soon as I take my foot off the accelerator, it brakes’. That’s obviously regenerative braking, and it’s a feature of the car, not a fault.”
Fightback
Seasoned fleet operators probably did not expect fact checking, myth busting and explaining the blindingly obvious to be such a major part of their job, and it could easily be written off as a sign of the times. But painful though it is, there is a silver lining, as the role now has more clout at board level.
“It’s created more responsibility for the fleet manager, but it’s also elevated their role,” says Hollick, “I don’t think we can forget that the decarbonisation agenda means a professional fleet manager, a fleet director or a head of fleet now gets airtime at the board on a regular basis.”
As to how to counteract the bogus, Edwards believes that circulating concise information is, these days, far better than the “10-15-page guides” devoured by early EV advocates, while drawing attention to the plethora of cheap new models cannot hurt.
Hollick advises against waving away the cynics: “I don’t think you can afford to be too dismissive. You need to embrace the misinformation, turn it around in the right way from a positive perspective and make sure your community is relatively well educated. If one person is going to raise something that you think is completely misinformed, I think you’ve got to assume that others out there are doing the same.”
He recommends sending weekly or monthly fleet bulletins to drivers and other employees, asking your leasing company (if you use one) for advice and involving HR and the board, who “will want the employee base to be well educated anyway, so you’d be pushing an open door.”
It is a tough line to tread, because fleet managers must also avoid the equally damaging position of EV evangelist. As Edwards says, “the idea that an EV will solve everything is wrong – it isn’t going to suit every single driver or every single application,” so any counterargument to a phoney storey must be empirical and nuanced.
Luckily for fleet managers, the facts are on their side. People might still do it, but it is hard to form a credible argument against 3% BIK.
AER rates: Acknowledging reality
As barmy as EV fables can be, there are legitimate concerns about charging costs and reimbursements unique to fleet that, if unchecked, could easily feed more general rhetoric about high running costs. As Alphabet’s Sandall-Mansergh explains, advisory electric rates (AERs) often come up short if drivers – some of whom may have little choice in the matter – do a lot of public charging.
“Mileage reimbursement is obviously particular to fleets, and the AER rates are generally quite low. If you are not mostly charging at home, then, invariably, you’re going to have months when you struggle to claim back enough to cover expenses… [and] company car populations do talk to each other for positive and negative reasons, especially if you’ve got people who consistently feel they’re out of pocket.”
AERs were seven pence per mile (ppm) at the time of writing – enough to more than cover home charging costs of 5.65ppm, according to the AA’s EV Recharge Report for March, but well short of the 11.3ppm for an 8kW public charger and 17.63ppm for an 150kW-plus ultra rapid charger and everything in between.
Sandall-Mansergh’s advice is to acknowledge it. “I think you need to listen to those very valid and substantiated concerns about the gap. You either choose to carry on ignoring it, or say, ‘is there something short-term we can do in terms of a cash top-up?’… and you might have to pay NIC on it.
“You don’t want to be doing that for very long [and] what fleets should really be aspiring towards is being able to reimburse people based on actual costs. It’s not particularly easy, and if you don’t have a decent internal resource and mechanisms to manage all that data, you then look at an outsourced service.”
