The first question most operators ask is “can we go electric?” It’s the wrong question. The right one is narrower and far more useful: which of our vehicles, doing which work, can go electric now? You’re not making a fleet-wide yes or no decision. You’re sorting the fleet into work that suits electric today, work that will in time, and work that won’t for years. The thing that decides which bucket a vehicle lands in is its duty cycle.
A duty cycle is just the pattern of work a vehicle does, day in, day out. Daily distance. The shape of the route. Where it starts and where it ends. What it’s carrying. How long it sits still, and where. Diesel never cared about that pattern. Electric is fussy about it.
Electric rewards a very particular shape of work. Predictable distance that sits comfortably inside the truck’s real range. A return to a base you control. And enough idle time to put the charge back in. Regional distribution that runs out and comes home fits well. Multi-drop urban work that pings around a city all day and parks up overnight fits well. The 600-mile trunking leg with a driver change and no return to base, turned straight back round, does not. Not yet. Most operators run both kinds of work, which is exactly the point. You’re triaging, not converting.
Here’s the good news. You already own the answer. It’s sitting in your telematics, and most operators never look past the fuel figures and the tacho. The numbers you need are dull ones: daily distance per vehicle, start and end location, hours parked and where. Pull a representative stretch, ideally a full year so you catch the seasonal peaks, and you can see precisely which vehicles never break a given daily distance, always come home, and sit for ten hours overnight. Those are your candidates.
You can pay someone to do this for you, and there’s no shortage of people who will. Sometimes that’s money well spent. Sometimes it’s a lot of money for what’s really a data export and an afternoon. One thing worth knowing: if a dealer reckons there’s a truck sale at the end of it, they’ll usually run the numbers for free, because the analysis is what sells the vehicle. It might not be your usual salesman, but the manufacturer will have someone who does exactly this. For plenty of fleets, though, a look at your own telematics gets you most of the way there. Take a look yourself first. You’ll know soon enough whether that’s enough, or whether your operation’s tangled enough to want a proper hand. And if you do bring someone in, you’ll be a far better customer for having looked.
One warning, because it catches people out. Don’t plan on the average. The average will flatter you and then strand a truck. A vehicle that averages 180 miles a day might still hit 330 once a fortnight, and if it can’t do the 330 on a single charge, it isn’t a clean swap. You design for the hard days, not the typical ones. Look at the spread, the peaks, the variability, not the mean. The worst regular day is the one that decides whether a duty cycle is electrifiable as it stands, or only with a contingency behind it: a route tweak, a top-up charge mid-shift, or a diesel kept back for the outliers.
Be honest about range while you’re in there. The brochure figure is not your figure. Cold weather, a full payload, motorway speed, the cab heater, the hills, and battery wear across the vehicle’s life all take a bite out of it. Plan against a realistic working range well inside the headline number, and assume winter is worse than you’d like. A duty cycle that only works if everything goes perfectly is not a duty cycle that works.
What you get out of all this is a ranked shortlist. Specific vehicles, on specific routes, that could move to electric now with room to spare. That list is the foundation for everything that follows in this series. You don’t size a grid connection, choose a charger, or spec a truck until you know which duty cycle you’re electrifying first. Everything downstream points back to this one piece of work.
One last thing. When you pick the first vehicle to switch, pick your easiest duty cycle. Not your hardest, not your highest-mileage. The instinct is to prove the technology on a tough route and silence the doubters. Resist it. You want a first truck that teaches you the ropes with margin to spare, not one that’s marginal on day one and sours the whole programme before it’s started. Save the difficult cases for when you’ve got the miles behind you.
You’re not asking whether the fleet can go electric. You’re asking which truck comes home every night with charge to spare. Find that one. That’s where this starts.
