Survey: 89% of UK fleet managers ‘will switch to EVs before 2030’

Almost nine in ten of the UK's fleet managers say they plan to switch the majority of their diesel and petrol vehicles with fully-electric or hybrid-electric vehicles (EVs) before 2028, new research by fleet management and telematics firm Geotab has found.


During the research period, Geotab quizzed 250 fleet managers across the nation to garner their views on electric vehicles (EVs), Government transport policies and current motoring infrastructure.

Of the survey respondents, almost half (46%) said their fleets currently have no hybrid-electric or fully-electric vehicles – but just 2% said they were happy with this model and saw no benefits in making the EV switch.

In contrast, 89% of the survey respondents said they expected EVs to play a “dominant role” in their fleets by 2030 – two years ahead of the 2030 goal outlined in the Government’s Road to Zero strategy. Six in ten of these fleet managers noted environmental sustainability as the main benefit of electrification, with other commonly cited benefits including reduced fuel costs and lower maintenance costs.

“These survey results help to demonstrate that the government’s call for an EV future is not something businesses are taking lightly,” Geotab’s vice president for Europe Edward Kulperger said.

“With most fleet leaders looking to have a fully EV-dependent fleet over the next few years, it’s no longer a question of if, but rather how soon a complete overhaul can take place.”

Barriers to electrification

Geotab additionally asked the fleet managers to explain what the most prominent barriers to EV adoption were in the current transport sector, with the most common answer being high upfront vehicle purchase costs.

Other common challenges included long charging times, low distance ranges and a lack of charging infrastructure.

These findings echo those made recently by the Department for Transport, which identified a lack of charging infrastructure, distance travelled per charge and vehicle cost as the three biggest barriers to EV adoption in the UK.

In response to the findings, Geotab will now lobby for ministers to introduce more incentives aimed at encouraging fleet managers to make the EV switch, and to build more modern charging infrastructure.

“Based upon the outcome of this survey, it’s clear that businesses and fleets feel they now need additional government initiatives and smart updates to critical infrastructure across the UK,” Kulperger added.

“If this can be made a priority, we are confident that the UK can take a spot as one of the most innovative global leaders trying to help push the widespread adoption of green transportation in the coming years.”

The survey comes shortly after the Committee on Climate Change penned a letter warning ministers that the Road to Zero strategy would not be sufficient to meet national and international climate targets, citing a lack of grants supporting EV uptake as a key failure of the roadmap.

Sarah George

Comments (2)

  1. Richard Phillips says:

    It is barely believable that such a majority should contemplate such a move. Besides the obvious problems of low distance ranges and the assurance of plentiful charging points at high power, there is the fundamental problem of the generation capacity. Nuclear will be declining, without the prospect of even the present fleer being replaced, let alone augmented. Relience upon large increases in wind power is unreal without fossil backup, the only solution to long period almost zero power. The first week of June this year saw a wnd outage of some five days, no contemplatableable storage can deal this,certainly not batteries, or hydro. This is withoutbthe additional gegeration needed for these vehicles

  2. Richard Phillips says:

    My comment closed before I had finished.
    It would seem to me that a great many fleet managers have not appreciater that neither smart meters or a smart grid do anything to make more power available unless it it being generated. The smart grid has only to be introduced because the chaotic nature of wind power makes manual grid control unworkable. With generation on demand these problems did not exist.
    I will beliecesome of the transformation when I see evidence of more copper going into the ground, substations to deal with an increased load, and the building of more dispatchable power plant, equal to the increase in wind generation.
    Perhaps I am being a tad cynical!,,
    Richard Phillips

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