What Is a Fleet? More Businesses Qualify Than You Think

Most business owners don't think of themselves as fleet owners or managers. However, a fleet is simply any group of two or more vehicles operated or managed by a business or organization. While this obviously can include a yard of long-haul semi trucks, it also encompasses small delivery vans, construction site pickup trucks, and company-leased personal vehicles. This definition is much broader than most business owners typically take into account, and if your business leases or runs more than one electric vehicle of any type, fleet charging planning will benefit you.

If you search "fleet vehicles" in Google image search, you'll find long lines of identical white delivery vans. While this is an accurate depiction of a corporate fleet, it is only one kind of fleet a business might manage. An electric fleet is better defined as more than a single electrified vehicle that needs a charging plan for one reason or another.

Start by determining ownership or operational responsibility. Does your business own, lease, or control multiple vehicles? Is the use of those vehicles in some way shared or coordinated, for instance, dispatched, scheduled, or assigned rather than personally owned by employees? Are costs such as fuel or charging for and maintenance of those vehicles centralized? A yes to any one of these questions means you have a fleet.

These cover vans, trucks, and other vehicles typically used by trade and repair businesses. Vehicles might go home overnight with the driver or be stored at a central lot. Your charging solution will completely depend on where this fleet spends its overnight hours.

These fleets are usually made up of panel vans and light commercial vehicles. Routes are fixed or variable depending on the scale and style of the business. They're usually depot-based, so charging can be completely centralized with overnight charging all that's needed, unless your routes are longer than the vehicle's range.

These are passenger vehicles assigned to individual employees. They might be depot charged, but they're more likely to be taken home by employees and used as mixed personal and professional vehicles. If so, you'll need an at-home charging solution that tracks either distance driven for professional purposes or kWh charged at home. How you reimburse this kind of take-home fleet is a business decision.

Shared vehicles used by multiple employees from a centralized pool. This means that access to vehicles and charging needs to be managed to track who's using what.

A mixed fleet combines any of the types described above. These are becoming increasingly common in small and medium-sized businesses.

The typical mental image of a fleet involves rows and rows of vehicles ready to be used. But as we've said already, all you need is more than one electric vehicle. Here's how charging decisions break down across different fleet sizes.

At 2–5 vehicles, this fleet size isn't often recognized as a fleet by the manager or managers in charge of the vehicles. However, if there's any sense that this fleet might expand with a growing business, it's worthwhile to invest in charging infrastructure now rather than later. It's easier to expand charging from 3 vehicles to 10 than it is to start from scratch once you're feeling the pinch. Building in load management from the start also avoids costly electrical upgrades further along.

Running from 6 to about 20 vehicles, small fleets are either large numbers of company passenger cars devoted to a decent-sized sales force or vehicles with a depot or yard somewhere. Many small fleets at this size are making do with a patchwork of charging choices that work for now but won't scale. The best approach for these kinds of fleets is typically one or more banks of AC charging stations with load management. If you need a few quick turnarounds just in case, a high-speed DC charger or two bridges the gap.

These fleets fall around 20–100 vehicles and require planned infrastructure. That means a fleet-focused software backend with planned charging unless you intend to have a dedicated charge point for every vehicle. A charging plan at this scale means scheduling vehicle charging times, prioritizing early-leaving vehicles, and managing the power load across what your power supply can actually manage.

Managing the entire fleet from a central location tends to be the simplest model. If your routes are shorter than the total range of your vehicles, then overnight charging is the easiest answer. If not all vehicles are needed at once, their charging can be staggered through load management, with software determining which vehicles charge first based on departure schedules. Smart load management distributes the available power load across vehicles, with software managing which vehicles complete charging when.

The other major form of overnight recharging is through fleet vehicles taken home by employees. Employees drive company-owned or leased vehicles home at the end of the day and charge overnight using their home electrical supply. An OCPP-compatible smart Level 2 charging station at home tracks charging data and feeds it back to centralized company software. There are a few different ways to reimburse employees. The first is through a set per-kWh reimbursement, similar to fuel reimbursement on gas-powered vehicles. The second is through a flat monthly stipend that is fixed no matter how much or how little the employee drives across the month. The third model is through a per-mile rate that's already used widely for non-electrified vehicles. Of these models, the per-kWh rate is the most accurate measure of cost reimbursement.

Whether your fleet is two service vans, a pool of company cars, or a mixed bag of vehicles across multiple use cases, the fundamentals are the same. You need OCPP-compliant hardware that works with the fleet management software of your choosing. You'll also need load management if more than a handful of vehicles will be charging from the same electrical supply. And if you're running a take-home fleet, you need a hardware and software combination that can attribute sessions to specific drivers and generate the reimbursement data your finance team can actually use.

The right time to sort this out is before the fleet grows, not after. Infrastructure planned for three vehicles is far easier to scale to fifteen than a patchwork of home outlets and extension leads that somehow became the default.

The MSI Eco Series is OCPP-compliant and works with a wide range of fleet management backends. If you're starting or expanding an electrified fleet and want to talk through hardware options for your specific setup, reach out to the MSI EVSE team.