Over the last 20 years, the fleet industry has experienced massive changes: GPS tracking, video telematics, predictive maintenance, connected vehicles, electric vehicles, and now, the advent of artificial intelligence (AI).

If these changes have felt like a whirlwind, the next era of fleet will feel like a hurricane if fleets aren’t prepared.

Josh Green is the Founder and CEO of Inspiration Fleet, the first “eFMC^®,” built from the ground up to help fleets evolve so they can prepare for and thrive in this new operating environment. In our recent conversation, he discussed some of the innovations shaping the fleet world and let us in on what the next era of fleet holds and how fleets can take advantage.

Electric Vehicles

Electric vehicles certainly aren’t new, but they also have yet to be adopted wholeheartedly by fleets. Although fleets have successfully integrated EVs into their lineup, the industry as a whole has seen fits and starts over the last quarter century. Green, however, says widespread use is coming soon.

“EVs will be the solution for most fleets in the future,” said Green. “Today, EVs are still thought of as new, even risky, technology, even though there’s ample data that EVs outperform their fossil fuel counterparts when fleets get implementation right. I don’t know whether it will be three years, five, or 10, but we’re rapidly approaching the tipping point, after which people will look at you like you have horns growing out of your head if you drive an ICE vehicle because you’re using yesterday’s or the last century’s technology.”

Green acknowledges that EVs aren’t a silver bullet — fleets should only move forward when and where they have the right vehicle for a given use-case paired with the right charging solution. His advice: If now isn’t the right time, fleets should still be thinking ahead five or 10 years from now — and that means at least dipping their toes in the water with well-designed EV pilots in the applications that clearly work today. That experience will be invaluable as EVs go mainstream in the coming years.

“One of the biggest barriers to more widespread EV adoption by fleets has been the rigidity of corporate procurement processes. Time and time again we see companies running RFPs using templates developed years, if not decades, ago. Increasingly, we’re being asked to come in and help rethink and update RFPs for the modern era,” he explained. “They’re using the same RFP questions they’ve been using for 20 or 30 years, often missing critical areas like change management and operational support, the range of charging options provided, how to assess which vehicles are ready to transition, and EV pilot design and implementation.”

Artificial Intelligence

Although AI has been around for a few years, we have only just begun to understand what it can do and how it will change fleet management.

In its current state, AI is helping ease data overload by excavating insights from massive data sets quickly and with little human intervention.

“What used to take an analyst multiple days to run a report can now be done in 15 minutes in the background,” Green said.

Beyond data analysis, Green says the next step in the AI revolution will be faster solution identification and new-product rollouts by fleet partners.

“We can use AI to develop new products and services and launch the exact solution our customers want much faster than in the past,” Green stated. “And that means being responsive to specific customer requests and giving them the analysis they want — everything from dashboards to reporting to trend analysis to scenario planning — and enabling them to make better-informed customer decisions. The combination of AI and large, connected data pools can be really powerful.”

Autonomous Vehicles

Although fleets have dipped their toes in EV and AI waters, they have yet to explore autonomous vehicles (AVs).

“The most disruptive development on the horizon is the rapid emergence of AVs,” Green said. “The transformative nature of autonomous vehicles is currently being underestimated, but they are going to be increasingly important for commercial fleets.”

Green envisions AVs supporting fleet applications that currently involve a lot of back-and-forth trips and coordination between employee homes, company offices or depots, and worksites. Add EVs to that mix, and now a charging location needs to be added to the mix. AVs add a completely new element. Instead of being stationed at a company depot or an employee home, AVs could be parked overnight at a secure and affordable third party charging facility, pass by the company depot in the morning to pick up supplies, and meet the employee at the worksite.

“Having the ability to unshackle all these nodes in the daily network — where the worker lives, where the vehicle “sleeps,” where it picks up daily supplies, and where work is performed — will be much more efficient, leading to productivity gains and large savings in terms of labor costs, fuel (electricity), and fleet spend,” Green said. “The best performing companies years from now will have begun planning for that future today.”

The New FMC Model

Fleets need to evolve. And Green said the fleet management company (FMC) model is changing, too. Whereas legacy FMCs have long-standing business models and vendor partnerships that usually lock customers in to using those specific partners, whether for telematics, maintenance, roadside assistance, or something else, fleets today benefit from working with an eFMC^® that is vendor agnostic.

“Our customers have expressed a desire to be unshackled from technology lock-in, free to adopt whichever new, better point solutions best fit their fleet.” he said. “What was best of breed 15 or 20 years ago that legacy FMCs built their platforms around may well not be the best choice today. There are new telematics players, there are new safety monitoring and camera players, there’s a lot of innovation. Our agnostic, open-architecture platform allows people to select their vendor of choice and integrate the data. The biggest advantage is that we’re unencumbered by decisions that were made in a different era.”

And fleets aren’t the only one evolving. Green has seen his own business, Inspiration Fleet, evolve over the last five years.

At inception, Inspiration Fleet’s eFMC^® model focused solely on EVs, helping fleets simplify and accelerate the transition to electric transportation. But as fleet customers benefited from the company’s strategic engagement model, AI-powered tech platform, and white-glove customer service, they began asking Inspiration Fleet to manage their ICE vehicles, too.

“If the customer pain point is X, the industry has always solved it with Y. Today, is that really the best way to solve that problem?” Green asked. “The real value in having an eFMC^® is the planning and strategy for how to evolve your fleet in a world of rapidly changing technologies and rapidly emerging vendors with new and better offerings.”

How To Prepare For The Next Era Of Fleet

Ultimately, Green says fleet managers who want to successfully navigate the next era of fleet will be more strategic than tactical, more proactive than reactive.

“The biggest limiter is settling for ‘we’ve always done it this way,’” Green said. “It takes guts, creativity, and imagination to question the status quo, but taking a step back and demanding more from your current provider, or, better yet, working with a company designed for this era, that is nimbler and more future forward, can yield a lot of benefits.”

To learn more about what will shape the next era of fleet management, click here.