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).
Advertisement
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.
« Virgin Atlantic to Start Offering Customers a Travel Data eSIM Service
Advertisement
Leave a Reply
Privacy Notice: Please note that news comments are anonymous, which means that we do NOT require you to enter any real personal details to post a message and display names can be almost anything you like (provided they do not contain offensive language or impersonate a real person's legal name). By clicking to submit a post you agree to storing your entries for comment content, display name, IP and email in our database, for as long as the post remains live.
Only the submitted name and comment will be displayed in public, while the rest will be kept private (we will never share this outside of ISPreview, regardless of whether the data is real or fake). This comment system uses submitted IP, email and website address data to spot abuse and spammers. All data is transferred via an encrypted (https secure) session.
We switched to an EV some years ago and never looked back. The little leaf we got did us well, only a little range anxiety on longer trips but day to day it was never an issue. Sadly, a car accident put the leaf out of action but gave us an opportunity to upgrade to a newer EV (Still a few years old) and now range anxiety doesn’t exist at all for us. Even longer trips is no sweat.
Fortunate enough that we can charge from home, which makes all the difference. I’d wager for 90% of the people in this country if you can charge from home, it’s cheaper to run an EV than ICE (Even before the Iran nonsense).
If you can’t charge from home, sadly I don’t think the infrastructure is there yet and public charging points are very expensive.
I think the infrastructure is getting there, it is vastly better than it was even a couple of years ago, some areas are a little sparse though. Depending what chargers are in your area an EV can still be significantly cheaper than ICE, there is various subscription options which bring down charging costs down quite a lot, especially if you need to charge more than twice a month.
I got my first EV just over a year ago, I’d never go back to ICE, currently when I charge at home, which is the bulk of my charging it costs just 1p per mile for electric, and that’s with a four year old E-Niro.