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Tim Washington, Co-founder and CEO of EV charging provider JET Charge, talks to Fleet News Group about the rapid rise of EVs in Australia, the start-up’s growth and evolution since it began more than a decade ago as an installer for Tesla home charging stations in Melbourne, and its trial of a charge-as-a-service business model.

When we spoke in late April, the latest data showed EVs sold in Australia in March was almost 10 percent of all new car sales for that month, a startling change from 1-2 percent of sales just a few years ago. Meanwhile EV sales in the UK and the US are slowing.

“I think Australia will be one of the countries that really bucks the trend in relation to EV uptake,” said Washington, adding, “ And the main reason for that is because we are far more receptive to Chinese-made vehicles than the US and Europe, because we have no manufacturing to protect.” 

And, he continued, “They've only just started exporting to the rest of the world. The reason you haven't seen most of these brands is because they've been basically satisfying demand in China. As competition increases, and they look to grow their market share, they will start exporting. Australia is one of the Western countries that accepts these vehicles. And so I actually think we're going to see Australia outpace the rest of the world in vehicle adoption.”

Noel Toribio Ilao, Director IV Equipment Bureau at the Department of Public Works and Highways in the Republic of Philippines, speaks with Fleet News Group podcast host Caroline Falls about a fleet of land vehicles, barges and boats that cater for infrastructure and rescue in the 7000-island nation.

The Philippines is one of the most disaster prone countries in the world,” said Ilao, adding, “ I think we're number three. We are visited by different calamities — on the natural side, we have typhoons, we are lying in an earthquake belt, which is the Pacific Ring of Fire.”

Daron Brinsdon, integrated development solutions manager at Teletrac Navman Australia, talks about key findings from a global survey the fleet management telematics group released in March.

Teletrac Navman has some 700,000 vehicles connected to its technology, spanning the globe. It surveyed about 500 fleets finding some two thirds of them currently operate electric vehicles. But they are still in transition and facing challenges.

“This two thirds has varying rates of onboarding,” said Brinsdon, adding, “We're still getting a lot of people who suffer from range anxiety, and worry about whether adopting EVs will allow them to perform the work they need to.”

He said the higher capital expenditure needed to acquire electric vehicles compared with traditional internal combustion powered vehicles was also a constraint on wider EV adoption.

Fleet News Group editor, Marc Sibbald, guest hosts the latest podcast with Jonny Parker, CEO and founder of EV Infrastructure group Thundergrid in New Zealand.

Sibbald caught up with Parker on the sidelines of the EROAD’s Fleet Day, held in Christchurch in late February. They talk about how NZ followed the Norwegian model to support EV adoption and how now EVs are going to help power NZ.

“We’re basically here to protect the grid,” said Parker describing Thundergrid, adding, an explanation of how increasing demands on the island nation’s power grid could lead to increased brownouts. 

Dundee is a bit of a star for EVs in Europe, notably for public transport and its innovative charging hubs.

Award winning fleet leader Fraser Crichton, Corporate Operations Fleet Manager at Dundee City Council in Scotland, tells Fleet News Group podcast host Caroline Falls all about a transformation spurred by an enthusiasm to clean the city’s air.

Dundee, half way between Aberdeen and Edinburgh, is nestled in a volcanic seat. Air is trapped hanging over the bowl cradling a city 8 miles by 5 miles. 

“It just like sits like a soup in the city,” said Crichton. “13 years ago, I went to an air quality meeting and discovered all these issues that we had with transportation. I just thought we're going to have to change this, we're going to have to do something about this. So that was the start of the journey,” said Crichton, adding: “We moved slowly but surely.”

Today more than quarter of the council’s 800-asset fleet is electric powered. And the whole city is networked with charging hubs and infrastructure, from pop-up street chargers, in all quarters and across disadvantaged and advantaged precincts.

Fleet News Group podcast features CEO of London-based Fully Charged Dan Caesar. He talks about the You-Tube star channel expanding to host electric vehicle and home shows around the world, including Everything Electric at the Sydney Showground in February. 

“We would sum it up as a festival of electrification,” said Caesar. 

He said the attraction of electric vehicles for many is just how tech advanced they are. 

“The further you get away from the environmentalists, and the more you get into the mainstream, the thing that seems to really work is it's progressive. It's cool. It's new, it's the best tech,” said Caesar. 

Adam Dennis, electric vehicle specialist at telematics provider Webfleet talks with Fleet News Group podcast host Caroline Falls about a platform his they launched in the US, the rapid growth of EVs, and the imperative fleets are experiencing to make the shift to cut emissions.

The EV Services Platform unveiled by Webfleet at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas in January integrates data from a range of providers, including charging equipment group CTEK and location specialist TomTom. It was hailed as a game changer for fleet customers to better manage their operations, including allocation of vehicles for specific jobs and management of battery charging. 

“We'll capture all the data from the charging events … give you good battery analytics, give you better ideas on when and how to charge. You can assign profiles to your charging stations so that they only charge when you're collecting green power, or they only charge in off peak times,” said Dennis, adding, “This will just allow us to offer larger fleet owners a much wider solution package.”

For our first podcast for 2024, host Caroline Falls talks with Chris Noone, CEO of car subscription provider Carly.

“If we take a hypothetical example a fleet manager may own or lease 100 vehicles, but at certain points of the year, they might need 120 vehicles or they could be subscription vehicles."

"And so they can make really smart decisions about how to get the most cost effective use of their capital. And then when they do have shorter term requirements for vehicles, they can get them within about two days notice. So the whole concept of sustainability has been baked into our business right from early on, even before we started talking about a lot of the environmental and technological changes that are happening.”

Dr Steve Nuttall, a director at research group Fifth Quadrant, likes to talk about fleet leaders, a group he’s identified after studying them for decades.

In this podcast he explains what a Fleet Management leader does with their fleet and how you can take a leadership role within your organisation as a Fleet Manager.

“What we're going to see during 2024 is a real focus on our hybrid products in the 300 series range,” said Daniel Petrovski, head of product strategy at Hino Australia, talking with Fleet News Group podcast host Caroline Falls. “They’ve gone through a massive increase in orders.”

Sales of the hybrid 300 have risen from about 50 a year to an order bank of some 350 as of late November when the podcast was recorded. He said lead-time on the vehicle was sitting at about six months.

Jess Bala, General Motors new managing director for Australia and New Zealand talks with Fleet News Group podcast host Caroline Falls about the US car company’s plans to bring the Cadillac brand down under, starting with the electric powered luxury SUV Lyriq in 2024.

“The Cadillac brand, globally is going through a very big transformation right now to an all EV portfolio which we will achieve by the end of the decade in 2030,” said Bala, adding, “And when you look at what is happening in Australia and New Zealand from an EV transformation standpoint, and how tech savvy our customers are, it just feels like the perfect time to introduce the Cadillac brand and bring this next generation of EV vehicles down under.”

Fleet News podcast host Caroline Falls talks with Collin Jennings, head of government relations and advocacy at the Motor Traders’ Association of NSW about training up the automotive workforce in Australia to meet the challenge of the increasing prevalence of electric vehicles, particularly for mechanics.

“In, Australia, just in mechanics — and this is excluding areas like auto electricians and body repairers and tow truck drivers — there’s just over 116,000 employed in motor mechanics. EVs are a different system, they're a different vehicle, and they require different skills,” said Jennings.

In this Fleet News Group podcast with host Caroline Falls, Dave Sanders, co-founder of Bestrane, talks about the escalation in interest in sustainable transport solutions and how his company which has eliminating waste at its heart helps transport and logistics groups.

“If I look at Origin Energy, for example, who are right in the crosshairs of the sustainability issue. Right now, they're in an industry that is struggling to understand what it means to be sustainable in supplying gas … From a fleet perspective, they've got lots of vehicles running around providing a service to a lot of Australia that doesn't have a great alternative right now; that may not be the case in the future. So from a sustainability perspective, they're trying to understand how can we do more with a minimum fleet necessary. And that's really the sort of services that Bestrane provide, not only on a one- time basis, but more importantly, over a much longer period of time.”

Sanders said conversations about improving a company’s sustainability have reached board level now. 

Lex Forsyth, CEO and co-founder of Janus Electric, an Australian startup that converts diesel engine prime movers to battery electric, talks about xxxx and xxxx in this edition of the Fleet News Group podcast.

Janus Electric was founded in 2020 when co-founders Lex Forsyth and Bevan Dooley tested an idea to convert a diesel prime mover to a battery electric vehicle.

“We thought, well, let's give this a go and take an old prime mover, which was 10 years old at the time and get a rolling prototype,” said NSW central coast based Forsyth.

A few busy years later, trucks number 17 and 18 are being built at the Janus Electric facility and they have orders for another 100 or so. Some 44 people work there.

In this Fleet News Group podcast, host Caroline Falls talks with Dickson Leow, General Manager at IM group, and also of its unit Infinitev, which saves spent electric vehicle batteries from landfill. 

The interview was just a day after Leow presented at the inaugural Australian Battery Recycling and Manufacturing Summit.

Mo Abbas, strategy and marketing executive at last-mile delivery group ANC Delivers, announced plans on this week’s Fleet News Group podcast with host Caroline Falls for an initiative to accelerate Australian fleets’ transition to electric vehicles.

ANC and partners including Fleet News Group, LDV Australia, Evie Networks and CarBon, will launch the campaign on World EV Day — on Saturday, September 9. 

The campaign — Take the Pledge — is aimed at getting organisations to pledge publicly their intentions on how many vehicles in their fleets they will switch to electric powertrains.

“We're launching a nationwide campaign to encourage companies across Australia and in fact further abroad to take the pledge and commit to adding zero emission vehicles to their fleet, so that we can support sustainable transport practices,” said Abbas, adding, “What we are trying to achieve is galvanise a commitment to an energy transition, one that's tangible, and that's backed by a hard commitment by a specific endpoint.”

ANC is committing to 100 electric vehicles by the end of 2025. It already has about 20, including a couple of three-wheeled tuk tuks, in its fleet of more than 1,000 vans and trucks nationwide.

Fleet News Group podcast, where host Caroline Falls talks about the intersection of fleet and sustainability introduces Heather Bone, the director ESG — environment, social and governance, ostensibly chief sustainability officer at Team Global Express.

Bone is a regular on the speaker and panel circuit at fleet transport, and sustainability conferences. 

Team Global Express is making a name for itself as a leader in the transition for a greener lower emissions fleet. It emerged out of the Japan Post Toll Group when the unit was hived off to a private equity group Allegro Funds in September 2021. It rebadged itself from Toll Global Express to Team Global Express, still the team at TSG.

Liz Yeaman, founder of NZ based transport consultancy Retyna, talks to Fleet News Group podcast host Caroline Falls about how she participated in NZ’s transformation to EVs almost 20 years ago, the upcoming Electro Mobility Summit in NZ she will be chairing next month, and the urgent need to adopt the technology we have in the face of climate change crises.

Prior to setting up the consultancy in 2018 Yeaman worked for 22 years at the EECA, Energy Efficiency and Conservation Authority. Latterly there she was general manager of transport and responsible for leading the government authority’s electric vehicle program.

She started working on EV projects at EECA as early as 2007.

Paul Fox, co-founder of EVIE Networks, builder of Australia’s fast charging network, talks with Fleet News Group podcast host Caroline Falls about the exponential growth of electrification infrastructure, enthusiasm for electric vehicles in Australia and the shortage of them here and around the world.

Among EVIE’s projects is, with support of ARENA, the Australian Renewable Energy Agency, the public network of 42 stations on an intercity network stretching from Adelaide, in South Australia, to Cairns, in far north Queensland. This charging network is designed to service and be affordable for work vehicles.

EVIE also has a fleet services unit to supply charging infrastructure at company depots and other commercial locations including shopping centres and tourism resorts.

Adrian Givoye, General Manager at RedBook Australia, a unit of carsales.com.au, talked with Fleet News Group’s podcast host Caroline Falls about residual values. Givoye stepped into the podcast studio at the Australasian Fleet Managers Association conference after giving one of the most interesting talks, covering the subject every fleet manager cares about. 

Tony Fairweather, founder and CEO of SEA Electric, took time out of the Brisbane Truck Show to chat with our podcast host Caroline Falls. They talk about the new Australian OEM’s expansion in the US, and Fairweather’s outlook for electric transport.

“The battery electric is the powertrain of choice for this segment,” said Fairweather, speaking about the last-mile, or urban delivery task. “Transitioning from now, next year and the year after, we’re going to be large in all markets globally. Even in developing markets, the incentives are there, the policies are coming into play. The diesel engine in terms of urban application will be dead in five to 10 years.”

SEA Electric started out in 2012 in Australia but is now headquartered in the U.S. as its proprietary drivetrains which can be fitted to an array of truck and bus bodies attract big contracts there, including for as many as 10,000 of the iconic yellow school buses.

SEA Electric now operates in several other countries, including New Zealand, Canada, South Africa, India, Thailand and Indonesia. Other big deals in the US include an exclusive contract with Mack Trucks to provide the powertrain technology for its medium-duty lines — the MD6 and the MD7.

Swedish truck maker Volvo unveiled its first electric prime movers in Australia at the Brisbane Truck Show. Tim Camilleri, e-mobility Solutions Manager at Volvo Group, stepped up into the cab of the FM to record this interview with our podcast host Caroline Falls.

“If this vehicle doesn't make noise, what can we do with it? How do we optimise its usage even further above and beyond what a vehicle that would make noise does?” — Tim Camilleri, e-mobility Solutions Manager at Volvo Group.

Tim Staley, Transport & Logistics Lead and Chief Operating Officer at technology consultancy NCS, spoke to Fleet News podcast, about key trends in transport, including autonomous vehicles, mobility as a service, intelligent transport systems to dynamically manage traffic, and more.

Staley whose broad senior executive experience encompasses working at global consultancy Accenture, major world mining group Rio Tinto, Australian commercial rail group Aurizon where he helped automate their railway operations, and on the gas fields at energy group Origin commented on the evolution of environmentalism and how all the worlds he operated in have coalesced.

“It does seem very natural now that an ecosystem has formed that needs to rise as one to achieve a new automated future with greater mobility options and greater sustainability to support a growing population,” said Staley. 

Brendan Wheeler, who co-founded EV charger supply group EVSE in 2015, talks to Fleet News Group podcast, about Australia’s new EV strategy, the outlook for EVs and charging infrastructure and gives a template for fleet managers to follow when making the transition.

"We've really got to take them all the way back to the start and ask some of those fundamental questions, such as, how many vehicles do you have? How far are they driving? How long have they parked for, and really go into a bit more depth and detail around those aspects to then come up with a final solution."

"Federal, state and local government EV policies are aligning which should really help to set the foundation for explosive growth over the next few years”. 

Fleet News Group podcast host Caroline Falls talks with Richard Lovell, executive director and head of debt markets at the Clean Energy Finance Corporation, about the Federal Government-backed green bank’s investments to accelerate decarbonisation of the transport sector, including electrifying fleets.

“There's a few recent developments, that have been very conducive to the transport sector, on its pathway for decarbonisation. The first and most obvious is that at the passenger and light commercial end of that spectrum, we are seeing increased vehicle availability through a number of manufacturers bringing greater numbers of electric vehicles to Australia, the number of types of models as well as the number of actual cars has been increasing. And that's really important because for fleets in particular, it's critical that vehicles are suitable,” said Lovell.

He said he expects this diversity of available EV models in Australia to accelerate as manufacturers start to step up their ambitions to transition their own manufacturing in line with set targets.

Similarly, an expansion of vehicle charging options and networks is stimulating fleet electrification, said Lovell, adding it was a more complex part of the puzzle. 

“Charging infrastructure is quite a challenge, because it is difficult to undertake classic investment that sees charging infrastructure as a typical infrastructure asset which replace steady cash flows over the life of its use in order to repay the capital costs and generate a profit. That's really hard with charging infrastructure for a whole bunch of reasons.

Greenpeace Australia Pacific Senior Campaigner Violette Snow talks with Fleet News Group’s podcast host Caroline Falls about the pro environmental group’s inaugural fleet rankings, and a new report outlining the case for corporate fleets to transition to renewable energy powered electric vehicles.

IKEA was named top green fleet in Australia by Greenpeace in mid March for its progress and commitment to electric cars, vans and trucks. Bank Australia was ranked second and Westpac third in a field of 30 big brand fleets analysed.

Snow said the organisation devised the rankings to highlight commitments to cutting greenhouse gases. It also fits in with its campaigns to bolster use of renewable energy in Australia.

Fleet News Group’s podcast host Caroline Falls chats via Skype to truck industry stalwart and advocate Jacquelene Brotherton as she drives to an appointment (We mention that because the sound quality is a bit bumpy). They talk about the ups and downs in the industry, covering staff shortages, Scott’s transport group’s collapse, concern about sustainability, shifts to improve regulation, appreciation of drivers, and acknowledgement of professionalism in the industry.

Brotherton grew up out the back of Burke where she met her future friends and bosses in the transport industry. Today she wears several hats, including chair of the Transport Women Australia Ltd, which brings together women from every facet of the industry — drivers, administrators, etcetera — for mentoring, networking, training and awards.

In this Fleet News Group podcast linked here Samantha Johnson, managing director of Polestar Australia, talks about the Volvo sister company’s electric vehicle design and its pole position among automakers in the sustainability race.

“Polestar really are ahead of everyone else in the auto industry, and they are influencing others to come along on their journey,” said Johnson. “We are doing everything that we can to bring the emissions down to zero within our cars that we are manufacturing and also as an organisation.”

Johnson is formerly of Volvo, which is owned by Sweden-based Geely, the same group that owns Polestar. Polestar started selling its electric vehicle the Polestar 2 in Australia in 2021 and to date has about 2000 vehicles on the road. The Polestar 2 is based on the automaker's Precept concept.

Fleet management group EROAD’s business development manager Chris Emerson talks on this Fleet News Group podcast about increasing pressure on fleets to meet sustainability targets, the future of road funding and what is top of mind for fleet managers in 2023.

“We know that a lot of very large organisations and government organisations are definitely feeling the pressure of the 2030 targets to get their fleets as sustainable as possible, to reduce emissions as much as possible,” said Emerson.

Emerson was referring to United Nations’ so-called Paris agreement to cut greenhouse emissions by 45 percent by 2030, compared with 2010 levels, in a quest to limit global warming, and climate change.

He talks about EROAD’s technology which helps fleets measure and manage their emissions, and identify vehicles that can be cut, or swapped to electric vehicles.

Stafford talks about connected vehicle technology trends, advances in artificial intelligence and machine learning and their impacts on fleets and the fleet manager.

As a manufacturer of telematics and connected vehicle technology Stafford said Directed Technologies’ role is to ease the workload on fleet managers; to give them information which is actionable.

Directed Technologies is a leading automotive and electronics solutions manufacturer, and full stack connected vehicle solution provider to automotive and fleet brands around the world.

To kick off 2023, Fleet News Group talk with Michael Hasten of LBM Fleet Solutions about one of our favourite topics — how the circular economy affects fleets.

"The circular economy has a multitude of impacts on fleet,” said Hasten, LBM’s chief commercial officer. “It's really adding a constraint to the traditional take and make approach. It's all about how do we actually reduce,reuse, recycle, to optimise and reduce waste. And the results obviously will be a more sustainable business environment.”

The circular economy is a guiding theme for the Fleet News Group podcasts. In 2022, we talked to Dickson Leow, general manager at Innovative Mechatronics, or the IM Group, about pioneering EV battery reuse and recycling in Australia, to Lina Goodman, CEO of Tyre Stewardship Australia, which is funding research and development of programs to find uses for end-of-life tyres, and to ANC’s CEO, Joe Sofra, who is building the largest electric van and truck fleet among Australia’s last-mile delivery specialists.

Fleet News Group podcast host Caroline Falls talks with Lee Sauerwald, president of the Australian Fleet Management Association (AfMA), for the last recording of 2022, about his own award winning fleet sustainability practices.

“Right back in probably 2010 is when we first started on our journey. And we've been on a carbon reduction path ever since,” said Sauerwald, adding that Uniting Communities where he was responsible for fleet at the time was ruled carbon neutral as early as 2015. He said the Adelaide based non profit, of which Sauerwald is now executive manager corporate services, is working towards a goal to be net zero by 2035.

Carola Jonas, CEO and founder of Everty, a company that offers a software platform to help companies operate and manage their EV charging infrastructure, talked to Fleet News Group.

She talked about the positive impact the removal of the fringe benefit tax on certain-priced electric vehicles will have. She also forecast the disparity will widen between low-cost charging of an EV compared with filling a car with petrol or diesel fuel.

Jonas founded Everty five years ago when, she said, the cost of charging an electric vehicle was about one-third of the cost of refuelling a traditional car or light commercial vehicle with petrol or diesel. Today she estimates it’s around one-quarter or one-fifth because fossil-fuel-based fuel has become more expensive.

Fleet News Group podcast host Caroline Falls talks with EnergyAustralia’s Jack Kotlyar about his NextGen unit’s dedication to helping fleets get set for electrifying their vehicles.

“From an EA perspective, and from a NextGen perspective, we are focusing on that electrification and decarbonization journey for those customers looking to buy electric vehicles,” said Kotlyar, Head of NextGen business unit.

Fleet News Group podcast host Caroline Falls talks with Evenergi managing partner Steve Lewis about how rapidly the climate has changed for EV adoption in the last six months, since his in-depth presentation at the AfMA fleet conference in May.

“The thing that's really sparked it is probably led to a degree by the federal government,” said Lewis, referring to the ousting of the Coalition by Labor at the last election and the new leadership’s ambition to accelerate the transition to low-emission transport.

Former 60-Minutes journalist Ray Martin and inventor Matthew Vaughan talk to Fleet News Group's Caroline Falls in this podcast linked here about the revolutionary suspension smoothing Base Air system that Martin reckons is among Australia’s best and biggest inventions — akin he reckons to WiFi, the Black Box, and the Cochlear implant.

“I thought Matthew was just in the long line of these little Aussie inventors in a back shed who changed the world,” said Martin, talking about his impression of the inventor and the air management system that can be fitted to a truck’s suspension for a smoother ride for the driver and the cargo, reducing fatigue and damage.

Martin said he’s followed Vaughan’s journey since meeting him and first hearing about the invention in a coffee shop in Sydney 13 year ago. After years of development and iterations, getting patent protection, and trials with big truck fleets, Base Air was recently officially launched together with news that Paccar Australia — the importer and assembler of Kenworth and DAF trucks — has adopted it into their parts distribution network.

ORYX People’s top directors Kris de Jager and Sharon Henderson talk about the changing role of the fleet manager, the great resignation and moves to attract more women in the transport sector in this Fleet News Group podcast.

Last-mile delivery group ANC’s CEO, Joe Sofra, talks about transitioning his fleet of 1,000 vehicles to electric, and concerns about charging infrastructure, in this Fleet Auto News podcast.

“At the moment my point of anxiety isn't necessarily around being able to source vehicles. My point of anxiety is much more around the supporting infrastructure to charge these vehicles. I'm probably more focused on that at the moment to make sure that we have the supporting infrastructure so we can expand the fleet as fast as we possibly can,” said Sofra in the 25-minute interview.

“I'm a lifelong surfer … an outdoor enthusiast and so the ocean environment has always been in my direct line of sight,” said Jay Collins, US-based senior vice president and general manager of EV and mobility at global fuel card brand WEX Inc.

Collins was speaking to Fleet Auto News’ Caroline Falls from his Portland, Maine, US home for this podcast talking about the big wave developing in EVs, and their role in building for a more sustainable future.

The podcast also features the new US legislation — the Inflation Reduction Act — which includes significant incentives for EV adoption and charging infrastructure.

Fleet News Group talks with leaders at mapping technology specialists HERE Technologies and Hema Maps in this podcast about their location services that help keep drivers on remote roads safe.

Robert Gallagher, HEMA Maps MD: “We're collecting enough data out there to get people into the regions and back home safely.”

Dan Antonello, GM ANZ, HERE Techonologies: “A lot of the products that come out of the content that we collect go into the navigation systems, turn-by-turn instructions for vehicles, but you also see, for your audience in particular, a lot of information going into the fleet telematics.”

“A lot of our customers are looking to do business with people who are net carbon neutral,” Philip Browne, MD of Autorola, Australia, tells Fleet Auto News’ Caroline Falls in this podcast. Browne talks about soaring used car prices, the group’s lean marketing practices of used fleet vehicles, and how they helped the online auctioneer go carbon neutral.

“It's all about being lean, and, and looking at processes to eliminate wasteful, expensive processes and move everything to an online environment ,” said Browne.

A key point of difference between Autorola and competitors is that Autorola doesn’t have a central site for storing and selling used vehicles. It only shifts vehicles from the seller to the buyer, eliminating costs and carbon emissions associated with moving vehicles to an auction site.

In our latest Fleet Auto News podcast we talked to Danielle Lackey, chief legal officer at Motus, a software as a service business for route planning, and accounting for personal use of fleet vehicles, among other things. We talked about the landscape in the United States and the appetite for transport sustainability.

The data captured by Motus from the 300,000 drivers using its system underpins the Internal Revenue Service’s business mileage standard, or the amount that an individual can deduct for business vehicle expenses.

Motus has also captured and analysed emissions data from the myriad various vehicles in its orbit to create carbon emissions reporting products that enables its clients to measure and manage their own sustainability goals.

Max Wang, an architect of the RACV’s multi-model journey planning app Arevo, talks to Fleet News Group’s Caroline Falls for this podcast linked here about MaaS, or mobility as a service, and how it can help fleets meet sustainability goals.

For a lesson 101 on MaaS, Wang, now Senior Product Manager at Intelematics, a pioneer Australian telematics group and a unit of RACV, the royal automobile club of Victoria, said the term MaaS really refers to this idea of making transport as easy, accessible, and sustainable as possible.

Fleet News Group spoke to Balz Eggenberger, Founder of Swiss-based fleet management consultancy Fleetcompetence, about the way fleets are managing the transition to electric vehicles in Europe.

Eggenberger who works with 55 partners in Europe and the US said the pivot to sustainability has brought the top management to the table with fleet management. He talked about being involved in two big projects where general management has set sustainability targets.

The huge swing to EVs in Europe has been propelled by companies setting zero-emission targets for carbon.

Ampol’s head of e-Mobility Angeles Miranda talks to Fleet Auto News Caroline Falls for our podcast series about the Australian petroleum company’s rollout of a national electric vehicle charging network, called AmpCharge, and how fleets are making the transition to  EVs.

In April 2022, Ampol announced it was rolling out an EV charging network at its petrol stations around the country, the first of which are set to open in June 2022.

Route planning can cut emissions as much as 20 percent is the takeaway from this podcast conversation with HERE Technologies’ Jason Jameson. Caroline Falls talks with the technology group’s general manager Asia Pacific about how technology can help organisations meet their sustainability goals.

“Sustainability is the big challenge of our time,” said Jameson, adding, “And from a business standpoint, it’s interesting because if you can reduce emissions, reduce the carbon footprint, as opposed to just offsetting it, you're really making a meaningful difference to the environment.”

Jameson said a 20 percent cut in emissions from route planning and optimisation is typical. He said idle times can be cut 20 percent, and estimated time of arrival on pickups and deliveries can be cut as much as 40 percent.

Bree Allen, Business Development Manager at Summit Fleet Leasing and Management, reckons you can make the business case now to have an electric car versus a traditional ICE vehicle. In this podcast Bree considers the total cost of ownership for going electric. 

“More and more people are enthusiastic about electric vehicles. There's a few factors driving change. Climate change awareness has to be a major driver. People in companies are concerned about the environment. A lot of companies also nowadays have emission targets built within their future business plans. The local government incentives are also assisting to drive that change. Plus technology advances including batteries, as well as the long term plans for manufacturers. We're not really going to be able to purchase ICE vehicles in decades to come. So I'm finding more and more companies are dipping their toes into what the future of fleet will look like.”

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Each year in Australia about 23 million car and motorbike tires are discarded. Another 19 million or so much larger truck tyres also finish up life on the road each year. In all, it’s some 330,000 tonnes of tyres that reach end of life each year in Australia.

The good news is that most of those are disposed of properly, recovered and processed ready for recycling and other uses thanks to Tyre Stewardship Australia, which is funded by accredited tyre brands and suppliers, and which focuses on ensuring as many as possible used tyres are collected and recycled.

Fleet Auto News spoke recently to TSA’s CEO Lina Goodman for our podcast about the problems and possibilities for new uses of spent tyres. TSA was formed in 2013 with its two key objectives to arrest the flow of used tyres going to landfill, and to find new uses for old and recycled tyres. While the earlier focus was on getting tyre suppliers to do the right thing, Goodman is presently focussed on getting fleet management organisations, and fleets, to become TSA accredited.

Today, some 90 percent of used tyres in Australia are saved from landfill.

Fleet Auto News’ Caroline Falls talks with Tim Roberts, founder of Perth-based consultancy Fleet Strategy and former AfMA, the Australasian Fleet Management Association. They talk about eco driving among other things. In particular they discuss a project Tim worked on with the National Roads Safety Partnership Program, developing a so-called tool box kit designed to help fleet managers lead a conversation with their drivers on the benefits of eco driving. 

Thankyou Sofico Services for sponsoring this podcast. 

Fleet Auto News’ Caroline Falls talks with Kirsten Corson, founder of EV sharing company Zilch in New Zealand for a FAN podcast. They chat about about NZ’s transition to EVs, Zilch’s role and the new association called Women of Electric Vehicles. 

The FAN podcast has a sponsor this year, Sofico Services. Thankyou Sofico for making this series possible. Themes for this year are future technologies for fleets, sustainability, and circular economy principles such as reuse, remanufacture and recycle.