One Year Ahead of Schedule – Vodafone UK to Convert Vehicle Fleet to EVs
Broadband ISP and mobile operator Vodafone UK has today revealed that they’ll have fully transitioned their car fleet to zero emissions Electric Vehicles (EV / BEVs) by 2026, which is a full year ahead of schedule. This forms part of the group’s commitment to achieving Net Zero across its operations by 2030 (i.e. removing as many emissions as they produce).
The vehicle leasing company, Arval UK, has been helping Vodafone to introduce battery-electric vehicles (BEVs) to their fleet since 2019. In 2020, just 16% of the company’s car fleet were BEVs, with PHEVs (plug-in hybrids) comprising 29%. Petrol and diesel cars were then removed from choice lists altogether in 2021, with PHEVs following in 2023.
So far, Vodafone UK has deployed around 300 EVs and the rollout will now complete in 2026, instead of the original target for 2027.
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Craig Login, Property Contract Manager at Vodafone UK, said:
“We have been pursuing a determined electrification strategy for our car fleet, driven by both our overall corporate environmental objectives and demands from drivers for zero emissions options.
With the help of Arval UK, we adopted a very structured approach to electrification, looking at everything from detailed whole-life cost modelling through to regularly meeting with manufacturers to ensure the latest electric cars meeting our needs were available.”
Mark is a professional technology writer, IT consultant and computer engineer from Dorset (England), he also founded ISPreview in 1999 and enjoys analysing the latest telecoms and broadband developments. Find me on X (Twitter), Mastodon, Facebook, BlueSky, Threads.net and Linkedin.
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Forget every city, at this rate every town will need a Rolls Royce Small Nuclear Fusion Reactor to jeep it going…
UK electricity consumption has dropped by 25% since its peak. If the entire UK vehicle fleet went electric overnight it only adds 10%. It’s not an issue.
We’ll need to increase power production, but remember that we’re not changing to EV all at once, car owners don’t charge their vehicles all at once, a lot of charging can and is done slowly when no one’s using the car (eg: overnight), and large deployments usually have systems in place to reduce power if the electrical grid requires it.
In other words, there’s work to do, but no need for hysterics.
*Fission reactor, Fusion is what the sun does and what we’re working on at ITER project in France. Fusion is always about 10 years away from being commercially viable… (joke)
Keep in mind that for these kind of fleet deployments you often have centralised depos for storage and maintenance. Wouldn’t be too hard to add some solar panels on top, and maybe some batteries on the side when they add in the chargers.
Except it won’t
Do yourself a favour and listen to the national Grid engineers instead of the daily mail
Yawnnn
Going by the wording in the article, I’m guessing this doesn’t apply to works vans and engineers vehicles – just the corporate “company cars.” The move to all EV, although admirable and is encouraged, does pose one worry for rural parts of the country. Say there is a wide-area power outage (like we have had in recent years) caused by serious storms. Engineers need to get to mast sites for maintenance, repair, or to top-up the diesel in the generators to keep the site on-line. Rural usually means remote, which means a lot of miles racked up to get out into these areas. In a wide area power outage, EV’s do have their drawbacks.
Vans will be factored in and likely to operate within range of the depot chargers.
Also, a lot of these media announcements haven’t factored in the total practicability of the arrangement. It’s just “sustainability” departments jumping the gun with their fingers crossed that it all works out in the end.
I speak from experience as my company have announced a 100% EV fleet by 2030 and we await the mass production of a cost effective 4wd at a price point comparable to the bottom of the range pickup trucks that we currently have on lease.