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Green says Go for Fleet Vehicles

Going green is anything but dull. There are many great benefits to companies for their fleets to go green and we are going to explore some of them in this resource.

A company who is leading the way in electric vehicle technology (EV) is Smith Electric Vehicles. They manufacture electric vans and trucks and are based in the United Kingdom.

Why should fleets go electric?

EV’s saves on costs: Electric vehicle cars in Europe and the States are generally much cheaper than diesel, however in South Africa they will initially be very expensive to purchase, with a lot of cost saving benefits in the long run.  Cost savings can be had on filter changes as well as road taxes (electric vehicles do not have to pay road taxes in the United Kingdom).  

How an EV works:
An electric vehicle gets charged for approximately 8 to 10 hours, this can be done in any normal power source. The EV trucks can ‘re-fuel’ by using a power source that they have onboard their vehicles, this comes in handy for when they do long hauls on the road.

Less on maintenance costs:
All conventional vehicles up until now have had a lot of maintenance costs. A conventional vehicle can have up to 1000 moving parts, whereas an electric vehicle usually has only four moving parts. Therefore we can deduce that the less moving parts a vehicle has, the chances of anything going wrong are lessened and the maintenance costs are also then decreased. Plus the batteries in an EV get additional energy from the brakes because the brakes are manufactured to convert into to energy for the batteries.

EV Specs:
A fleet manager will not have a problem finding the specifications of electric vehicles attractive. While the range for a truck will have an average of 240kms, smaller vehicles will have an even bigger range than that. The batteries are rated at 120 kilowatts. The vehicles have a maximum speed of 80kmh and are ideally suited to be used for transportation in city areas where the vehicles do a lot of stopping and starting.

Green is the future                                                             
The potential of battery-powered vehicles has not yet begun to be realised because hybrid cars and electric cars are very much in their infancy. Countries such as USA, UK and Japan have realised the benefits of zero-emission for with a wide variety of EV’s available for personal use and well as for fleet management, but for most countries this concept has not even begun to take off yet.

In South Africa, a hybrid truck will soon be tested by Isuzu. Converting over to EV’s for fleet management should thereafter be an easier concept for fleet managers to grasp in South Africa. Unfortunately when these hybrid technologies become available in SA they are expected to initially be very expensive, however fleet managers will hopefully be motivated by the savings that can be made on their fleets in the long term.

So overall it seems that going Green has a very bright future worldwide indeed.

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