All-electric fleets within a decade?

A survey of small UK LCV operators has found that 24% think UK fleets will be fully electric within 10 years.

That’s one of the findings from a Renault-Nissan-Mitsubishi Alliance LCV business survey, which spoke to 501 small businesses in the UK.

The survey also found that 33% said business efficiency was the main motivation for adopting new technologies within their fleet, while cost-saving was cited by 17% as the primary cause.

Only 6% were chiefly motivated by sustainability.

The survey also found 59% of UK small businesses believe they are set up well for the demands of e-commerce.

The Alliance carried out the same survey in other countries, which threw up some interesting comparisons.

For example, 10% of UK respondents believe fleets will never be fully electric, compared with just 1% in China but 39% in the United States.

When asked about autonomous technology, only 14% of UK respondents believed fleets would be fully autonomous within a decade, with 35% believing it will never happen, compared with 43% of Chinese respondents expecting full autonomy in the next 10 years.

Only 5% of UK respondents think autonomous technologies are crucial to the future of logistics, compared with 27% in China.

In the UK, vehicle manufacturers were voted as the leading entity that should be responsible for creating greater access to autonomous vehicles, chosen by 34% of respondents.

Alliance senior vice-president for LCVs Ashwani Gupta said: “These results show that the electrification of fleets is increasingly on the minds of our customers – not just for the financial efficiencies that EVs can deliver, but because environmental sustainability is clearly crucial to the future of their businesses. “I’m impressed at how optimistic these fleet managers are about the speed in which their vehicles will be fully electrified.”

Source: www.whatvan.co.uk