Interestingly I sat down with my good friend Marc McLoughlin (KeyFleet Vehicle Leasing & Fleet Management) this week, who walked me through the numbers.

The upshot was. Today’s electric cars help you reduce your ongoing costs, save you tax and reduce your environmental impact, without having to suffer from the dreaded range anxiety.

We looked at mid-range fleet vehicles, comparing a comparable combustion engine (petrol / diesel) against a pure electric vehicle.

At first glance the full electric vehicle looked way more expensive on the monthly lease charge.

But once you filtered in things like tax savings, fuel savings and maintenance savings, the full electric vehicle worked out at around £200 cheaper against a comparable combustion engine vehicle.

Which is a massive £7,200 saving over a typical 3-year lease period.

OK I agree, you really need to install an electric car charger at the vehicles home address, to make it a true comparison.

But with a government OLEV grant of £350 available, it brings the home electric car charger installation cost right down to around £500, and still gives you a 3-year saving of circa £6,700.

For larger fleets, you may even consider installing some workplace EV chargers too, so fleet cars can be charged at work, and employees with non-fleet electric cars could use them as a benefit too.

Workplace OLEV grants of £350 for each charger installed are available, and you can get a massive 40 workplace electric vehicle chargers installed and claim a £350 grant for each one.

You must consider though, a workplace charger is more expensive to install, as it’s a more robust charger with a more complex installation. A standard installation (less £350 grant) is circa £1,000.

As an example: If you’ve a fleet of 20 vehicles and switch them to full electric vehicles and install 20 home EV chargers with 4 workplace EV chargers, you’ll save a gigantic £130K over 3 years.

Less the grant, 20 home EV chargers and 4 workplace EV chargers are likely to cost circa £14K, and if you can’t pay it up front, you can even lease the whole amount over 3 years, making it affordable.

Fitting a home EV charger for each fleet car driver and a smaller number of workplace EV chargers is the perfect way to solve range anxiety too. At work fleet car drivers can top up whilst in and get a full charge at home when sleeping.

You’ve got to understand, the range on today’s electric vehicles has vastly improved, with some now reaching beyond 300 miles.

Which is set to increase periodically with further improvements in battery technology, with many new ranges due to launch early 2021.

Another thing to throw into the mix, is the personal tax savings your fleet car users could make.

Currently for the typical mid-range company vehicle, the personal tax is around £400, whereas, if they switched to a pure electric vehicle this will be zero. Yes, they save the full £400 a month.

So, you can imagine the switch by business fleets from combustion engines to pure electric vehicles is also being driven hard by the company vehicle drivers themselves. And even those who had previously opted out and bought their own car, are now thinking they want to opt back in.

Finally (although not an after-thought) let’s talk about the environment. Obviously, going from many carbon emissions with combustion engines to zero carbon emissions with pure electric vehicles is huge for the environment, and will be an important element of your environmental policy.

If you want to discuss the savings your organisations can make by moving your fleet to pure electric vehicles, complete with the right electric car charging infrastructure, call Darren on 07887 548523.