Fleet News Group

Dundee is a bit of a star for EVs in Europe, notably for public transport and its innovative charging hubs.

Award winning fleet leader Fraser Crichton, Corporate Operations Fleet Manager at Dundee City Council in Scotland, tells Fleet News Group podcast host Caroline Falls all about a transformation spurred by an enthusiasm to clean the city’s air.

Dundee, half way between Aberdeen and Edinburgh, is nestled in a volcanic seat. Air is trapped hanging over the bowl cradling a city 8 miles by 5 miles. 

“It just like sits like a soup in the city,” said Crichton. “13 years ago, I went to an air quality meeting and discovered all these issues that we had with transportation. I just thought we're going to have to change this, we're going to have to do something about this. So that was the start of the journey,” said Crichton, adding: “We moved slowly but surely.”

Today more than quarter of the council’s 800-asset fleet is electric powered. And the whole city is networked with charging hubs and infrastructure, from pop-up street chargers, in all quarters and across disadvantaged and advantaged precincts.

Fleet News Group podcast features CEO of London-based Fully Charged Dan Caesar. He talks about the You-Tube star channel expanding to host electric vehicle and home shows around the world, including Everything Electric at the Sydney Showground in February. 

“We would sum it up as a festival of electrification,” said Caesar. 

He said the attraction of electric vehicles for many is just how tech advanced they are. 

“The further you get away from the environmentalists, and the more you get into the mainstream, the thing that seems to really work is it's progressive. It's cool. It's new, it's the best tech,” said Caesar. 

Adam Dennis, electric vehicle specialist at telematics provider Webfleet talks with Fleet News Group podcast host Caroline Falls about a platform his they launched in the US, the rapid growth of EVs, and the imperative fleets are experiencing to make the shift to cut emissions.

The EV Services Platform unveiled by Webfleet at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas in January integrates data from a range of providers, including charging equipment group CTEK and location specialist TomTom. It was hailed as a game changer for fleet customers to better manage their operations, including allocation of vehicles for specific jobs and management of battery charging. 

“We'll capture all the data from the charging events … give you good battery analytics, give you better ideas on when and how to charge. You can assign profiles to your charging stations so that they only charge when you're collecting green power, or they only charge in off peak times,” said Dennis, adding, “This will just allow us to offer larger fleet owners a much wider solution package.”

For our first podcast for 2024, host Caroline Falls talks with Chris Noone, CEO of car subscription provider Carly.

“If we take a hypothetical example a fleet manager may own or lease 100 vehicles, but at certain points of the year, they might need 120 vehicles or they could be subscription vehicles."

"And so they can make really smart decisions about how to get the most cost effective use of their capital. And then when they do have shorter term requirements for vehicles, they can get them within about two days notice. So the whole concept of sustainability has been baked into our business right from early on, even before we started talking about a lot of the environmental and technological changes that are happening.”

Dr Steve Nuttall, a director at research group Fifth Quadrant, likes to talk about fleet leaders, a group he’s identified after studying them for decades.

In this podcast he explains what a Fleet Management leader does with their fleet and how you can take a leadership role within your organisation as a Fleet Manager.

“What we're going to see during 2024 is a real focus on our hybrid products in the 300 series range,” said Daniel Petrovski, head of product strategy at Hino Australia, talking with Fleet News Group podcast host Caroline Falls. “They’ve gone through a massive increase in orders.”

Sales of the hybrid 300 have risen from about 50 a year to an order bank of some 350 as of late November when the podcast was recorded. He said lead-time on the vehicle was sitting at about six months.

Jess Bala, General Motors new managing director for Australia and New Zealand talks with Fleet News Group podcast host Caroline Falls about the US car company’s plans to bring the Cadillac brand down under, starting with the electric powered luxury SUV Lyriq in 2024.

“The Cadillac brand, globally is going through a very big transformation right now to an all EV portfolio which we will achieve by the end of the decade in 2030,” said Bala, adding, “And when you look at what is happening in Australia and New Zealand from an EV transformation standpoint, and how tech savvy our customers are, it just feels like the perfect time to introduce the Cadillac brand and bring this next generation of EV vehicles down under.”

Fleet News podcast host Caroline Falls talks with Collin Jennings, head of government relations and advocacy at the Motor Traders’ Association of NSW about training up the automotive workforce in Australia to meet the challenge of the increasing prevalence of electric vehicles, particularly for mechanics.

“In, Australia, just in mechanics — and this is excluding areas like auto electricians and body repairers and tow truck drivers — there’s just over 116,000 employed in motor mechanics. EVs are a different system, they're a different vehicle, and they require different skills,” said Jennings.

In this Fleet News Group podcast with host Caroline Falls, Dave Sanders, co-founder of Bestrane, talks about the escalation in interest in sustainable transport solutions and how his company which has eliminating waste at its heart helps transport and logistics groups.

“If I look at Origin Energy, for example, who are right in the crosshairs of the sustainability issue. Right now, they're in an industry that is struggling to understand what it means to be sustainable in supplying gas … From a fleet perspective, they've got lots of vehicles running around providing a service to a lot of Australia that doesn't have a great alternative right now; that may not be the case in the future. So from a sustainability perspective, they're trying to understand how can we do more with a minimum fleet necessary. And that's really the sort of services that Bestrane provide, not only on a one- time basis, but more importantly, over a much longer period of time.”

Sanders said conversations about improving a company’s sustainability have reached board level now. 

Lex Forsyth, CEO and co-founder of Janus Electric, an Australian startup that converts diesel engine prime movers to battery electric, talks about xxxx and xxxx in this edition of the Fleet News Group podcast.

Janus Electric was founded in 2020 when co-founders Lex Forsyth and Bevan Dooley tested an idea to convert a diesel prime mover to a battery electric vehicle.

“We thought, well, let's give this a go and take an old prime mover, which was 10 years old at the time and get a rolling prototype,” said NSW central coast based Forsyth.

A few busy years later, trucks number 17 and 18 are being built at the Janus Electric facility and they have orders for another 100 or so. Some 44 people work there.