Paul Fox, Co-founder and Chief Strategy Officer at Evie Networks, was speaking on a panel at the recent AfMA fleet conference in Sydney. I grabbed him for an interview afterwards to find out how much things have changed since he attended his first fleet conference in 2020.
This is probably the third or your fourth AfMA Conference you’ve been to, how have you seen the event change over the years? And how have the questions changed from delegates about electric vehicle charging?
There’s definitely change, I guess 2020 was probably the first time there was fairly light coverage. And then, over the years, we’ve seen more and more of the exhibitors and more and more of the panel sessions.
I think last year was the first time where we saw a lot of EV transition panels. It became the majority of both exhibitors and panels, and this year we’ve just seen a continuation of that. I think what we’re seeing this year compared to last, is the knowledge of the attendees has come along. Perhaps that’s partly due to what they saw last year and what they’re hearing coming down from their boards or the stakeholders and so forth.
The questions from the panel I was on were highly educated questions, rather than maybe what you would have seen at previous events. So we’re now starting to ask nuanced questions about what the transition is going to be like for fleets.
Once you get an electric vehicle, within 10 to 20,000 kilometres, all problems seem to have gone away just simply because you’re starting to get to understand the nuances of refuelling those vehicles.
I think there’s probably still people I’ve spoken to during the morning teas and the lunches, suggesting you know, we couldn’t do it. More so from smaller fleets, perhaps, or maybe regional fleets.
One of the things that came up in your panel, which all four panelists agreed with, it’s not that hard to get charging infrastructure?
It really isn’t that highly technical. Number one for a fleet, what really matters to the fleet, is revenue kilometres or it’s achieving the mission of that fleet. Be it providing district nursing or whatever. That’s priority one.
And then after that comes the question, how do you charge? How do you provision for depot charging and home charging?
Home charging is just a snap, we can basically do that through the app and we send a link out and you click the link and it guides you through the process. You take a photo of where you want the charger, you take a photo of your meter box and that’s it.
For depots, they require a bit of engineering, but it’s nothing beyond an electrical engineer who has a level of knowledge about the subject matter area. Then it’s about the lead time and making some business decisions about what is the best way to solve any issues that come up. Like, how much trenching do I want to do? Maybe you wanted to put them on the other side of the car park but don’t want to put a trench down the middle of your car park. They’re not hard problems. They’re just following an engineering process.
You mentioned it might involve time and paperwork, but it sounds like you’ve solved all the main problems?
Dealing with the utility networks requires a level of understanding of their language and thinking to make sure you’re getting the right tariff. So that’s a little bit of skill.
Then the property side can be another aspect. So if you’re a fleet that has multiple locations and maybe you own some but others are leased and you’re with multiple landowners, those sorts of things we come across. You’ve got to get all the approvals. You got to take that to council.
Engaging the property of people in your business is where to start with that part of the EV charging infrastructure process, isn’t it?
You know, it’s interesting how often we get asked to get involved. The property people know how to do that, but very often they can be beginning and end of lease people depending if they have been through cycles of upgrades. But we do get asked to get involved because there are additional things that come into it because of electric vehicles.
I want to ask you about the grid. On the panel you talked about the grid, and I think your quote was that in Australia, the grids in relatively good shape. Everyone talks about the grid being the first thing you have to do with EVs, but it sounds like there’s a lot you can do before looking at the grid. Has that changed over the years, or has technology allowed you to do more with less?
I think there was a little bit of misunderstanding, or maybe even fudge with talk like, we’re going to plug in all these EVs that will bring down the grid. The reality is we’re putting in pretty high power, much higher power stations than most businesses were putting in in their phase one or their pilots, and we rarely have to do grid augmentation. So to me, I think people are starting to move beyond that initial kind of fear and misinformation that was out there.
So at the AfMA fleet conference next year, what do you think you’ll see, and where do you think the maturity level will be at, and how do you think it will change?
What I’d like to see is more real life case studies because I think there’s some great projects going on across Australia at the moment. The work that we’ve done with Hertz and Avis and the work that Tim (Washington from JET Charge) was talking about with Team Global Express, and some of those case studies and getting getting into it. Essentially having some of these fleet managers on stage talking to fleet managers. Wouldn’t that be great to hear those journeys and stories?
If you go down stairs to the exhibition space, you see a lot of passenger vehicles and you see a few vans, and trucks. Next year, you’ll see more vans and trucks, and more utes. They’re coming in.
We had the LDV van introduced a few months ago at Everything Electric. That is incredible value for money for a white van. And we’ll see more of those this time next year.
So that’s going to be exciting because perhaps we’ll see more experience on some of these fleets of actually deploying them out there.
So I think that’s kind of the move from pool vehicles, passenger vehicles, into utes and vans and the light trucks and so on. I think that’s an exciting thing for next year and hopefully hearing back about how people are going on that journey.
