Enterprise Uncovers the Potential of Fleet Electrification

With the impending transition to electric vehicles (EVs) on the horizon, fleet managers are experiencing a growing need for reliable data on the subject to inform their long-term business strategies.

Working together, Enterprise Fleet Management and Geotab conducted a massive Electric Vehicle Suitability Assessment, designed to better understand how the shift to EVs will affect business today and in the future.

The Challenge: Look at the Big Picture to Understand How the Shift to EVs Will Affect Their Fleet

As a leading fleet management provider with more than 649,000 managed vehicles and a presence in over 50 local markets in North America, Enterprise Fleet Management partners with companies, government agencies and organizations operating medium-sized fleets of 20 or more vehicles.

Enterprise and Geotab’s long-standing relationship led to a unique opportunity to for the two innovative companies to do something unprecedented.

“Working together, we started to better understand the big data capabilities Geotab has,” explained Chris Haffenreffer, Assistant Vice President of Innovation at Enterprise Holdings. “We realized that if we could combine Geotab’s analytics with Enterprise Fleet Management’s real-world data on a large scale, we could develop a unique perspective on how we expect our fleet to evolve in the coming years.”

The Solution: Conduct a Massive Electric Vehicle Suitability Assessment

Calling it a large-scale study might actually be underplaying the enormity of what they were able to accomplish.

Not only did the assessment of over 91,000 vehicles allow the team at Enterprise Fleet Management to better understand the market opportunity today, but it also provided valuable insights to further support their customers in the future.

Using aggregated data from Geotab to show how vehicles were being used by Enterprise Fleet Management clients, the two teams were able to produce a factual and reliable suitability assessment on a scale never attempted before.  

“Having accurate, real-world data from the fleet helps us reduce as many assumptions as we can for our analysis and predictions,” explains Hani Hawari, Senior EV Product Manager at Geotab.

The Results: Pickup Trucks Will Be a Game Changer

The initial results of the study showed that of the 91,252 vehicles assessed, 13% (approximately 12,000 vehicles) were good candidates to be electrified today, resulting in a sum of tailpipe CO2 reduction of 194,000 tons over 4 years and a potential associated cost savings of $33 million.

But one of the biggest eye openers was data that showed what could be a monumental shift when electric pickups become available in the market.

As Enterprise Fleet Management’s fleet is largely made up of medium-duty work vehicles and pickups, they were interested to learn what data the assessment could provide to help them compare the EV opportunity today, versus what the opportunity would be in the near future with the coming wave of commercial EVs and electric pickup trucks.

When the study shifted to look at the opportunity once electric pickups become available, the number of analyzed vehicles that could be electrified jumped from 13% to 45%, or approximately 42,000 vehicles.

This shift would equal 1.3 million tons of tailpipe emission reductions across the entire fleet over a 4-year service life. With half the fleet electrified, the cost savings would equal an impressive $167 million, or $4,056.20 per vehicle.

“When we start to see numbers like that, and where that inflection is, we get a sense of what we need to plan for today versus what to plan for two years from now,” adds Haffenreffer. “It gives us a lot of good data to inform our strategy and ultimately simplify what was a relatively complex situation we are navigating.”

Driving Customer Success Using Real-World Data

Now armed with the data from this large-scale study, Enterprise Fleet Management has the information they need to stay in front of industry EV trends and understand the landscape. This allows their local teams to make informed recommendations to customers both in the present and the future. This study also gives them a timeline to understand the impact EVs can have on their business, fleet operations and customers.

“As more vehicles become connected, and more reliable information is gathered, this type of study can only get better. We’re not in the business of guessing how things will impact our fleet. We want to use real-world date to help our customers any way we can,” concludes Dain Giesie, Assistant Vice President at Enterprise Fleet Management.