The mistake is starting with the vehicle instead of the operational reality. When you understand your routes, payloads, stop-start patterns, and charging environment, the decision becomes simple. The right EV is the one that can deliver your existing service levels for less than your internal-combustion fleet, and most companies only discover that once they analyse their own data.

Some fleet operators want to “see what EVs can do”, so they try to electrify the hardest, longest, most unusual route on the network. When that does not work, they conclude that they are not EVs ready. In reality, they’ve just started in the wrong part of the fleet.

For urban logistics and retail distribution, utilisation is the first step. Many operators are running delivery vehicles, with dense routes and high monthly mileage on repeatable loops between depots and stores. That is precisely where EVs tend to win first. In that context, fuel and maintenance become the real cost problem, not range. Once you map those duty cycles properly, it often becomes clear that a significant share of those delivery routes are already suited to electrification.

Pharmaceutical and cold chain fleets frame the problem differently. Their priority is product integrity and reliability. They need to know that an EV can power both the drivetrain and the refrigerated body, complete all drops, and keep temperatures in range without compromise. The good news is that many of these deliveries run on very stable schedules in well-defined urban or peri-urban areas. That predictability is precisely what makes EVs viable.

Sales and technical support teams sit on another part of the spectrum. They are often over-supplied in terms of vehicle size and under-supplied in terms of efficiency. A field sales representative doing long days between customers does not always need a one-tonner. What they need is enough range for a full day, predictable charging at home or at the office, and a monthly cost that does not blow up when fuel prices move.

Light industrial and construction support fleets require more care. There are genuine constraints on rough sites, variable loads, and access roads. That does not mean EVs are off the table. It means you separate the fleet into use cases. The heavy rural or cross-border work might follow later as vehicle options expand. The mistake is trying to solve everything on day one rather than starting with the parts of the fleet that are already a good fit.

Fleet operators must focus on the norm, not the exception. Stop designing your EV strategy around the worst-case day of the year. Design it around the routes you run every single week.

This is where an EV-as-a-Service model becomes powerful. Instead of buying vehicles outright, guessing lifetime costs, and building your own charging and data stack, you can take an integrated monthly service that includes vehicles, chargers, managed electricity, maintenance, insurance, and telematics. We begin with your data under NDA, simulate your routes, identify which vehicles and industries are ready, and then prove it with a live pilot. You see the real energy use, the real uptime, and the real cost per kilometre in your own operation before you commit at scale.

Choosing the right EV for your fleet is about matching the right vehicle class to the right work, industry by industry, route by route. If you know how far you drive, what you carry, where your vehicles sleep, and what you truly spend to keep them moving, you already have everything you need to make a better decision.

Paul Plummer, Chief Commercial Officer, Everlectric