Openreach Reach 7,000 Electric Vehicles as Part of UK Fleet Transition
National network access provider Openreach (BT) has today announced that they’ve deployed their 7,000th Electric Vehicle (EV) on UK roads to support their broadband and phone engineers, which is up from around 6,000 in December 2025. Most of the operator’s EVs come from brands such as Ford, Stellantis (e.g. Vauxhall), Toyota, and Renault.
The operator, which manages the second-largest commercial vehicle fleet in the UK (c.23,000 vehicles), is currently aiming to upgrade the “vast majority” of their diesel-powered vans and cars to EVs by the end of March 2031 (supporting their Net Zero target for the same date).
In order to support this transition, Openreach have been busy installing EV charging points at operational sites and engineers’ homes (they’ve done more than 4,000 of these) for convenient overnight charging. The company has also previously built a partnership with First Bus, so engineers can charge their vans at First Bus depots, taking pressure off public charging points and making life easier for those who live in flats. A similar deal was recently agreed to harness Sainsbury’s nationwide EV charging network (here).
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However, despite the progress, Openreach recognises that charging can still be a problem, particularly with around one in three of their engineers being unable to install a home charger. As above, the operator has already attempted to mitigate that by enabling engineers to use a mix of home, workplace, depot and public charging, depending on where they live and how they work.
In addition, they’ve introduced shared, bookable depot charging to give options to those who can’t charge at home, and they’ve also started testing “cross‑pavement charging“. The update doesn’t explain what approach they’ve taken with this, but it usually allows people without access to off-street parking to charge their EVs at home by running a cable through a shallow channel (gully) in the public pavement.
“A small group of engineers are testing whether these solutions are safe, practical and easy to use,” said Judy O’Keefe, Director of Fleet.
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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