By CIO Insider Team
 

A fleet operations manager at a parcel delivery company in Bristol told me last month that his telematics dashboard treats his 12 electric Vauxhall Vivaro-e vans the same way it treats his 40 diesel Sprinters, which means it tries to report fuel consumption figures for vehicles that don't burn fuel and leaves a blank space where battery state of charge should be. He'd been using the same platform for six years, and nobody from the vendor had mentioned that the EV integration was, in his words, "basically cosmetic." The dashboard shows location, speed, harsh braking events, and idle time. It does not show how much charge remains in the battery at any given point, whether a driver stopped to charge during a route, how long that charge took, or what the energy consumption per mile looks like on a cold January morning versus a mild day in June. He found out about most of these limitations after the vans had already been on the road for three months.

This is becoming a familiar grievance as UK fleets push further into electric light commercial vehicles. SMMT figures show that battery electric van registrations in the UK reached around 27600 units in 2024, up roughly 42% from the year before, and the ZEV mandate is pushing those numbers higher through 2025 as manufacturers face penalties for missing their zero emission sales quotas. A Logistics UK survey from late last year found that 38% of fleet operators with more than 20 vehicles were running at least some electric vans, up from about 22% in 2022. But the telematics platforms most of those operators rely on were built over the past decade, almost entirely around internal combustion engine data. They read CAN bus information designed to report injector timing, exhaust temperatures, diesel particulate filter status, and fuel rail pressure. When you plug the same OBD device into a Ford E-Transit, the data that comes back is structured differently, and in plenty of cases, the platform just doesn't know what to do with it.

Tom Beckett, who manages fleet operations for a building supplies distributor running 85 vehicles out of three depots in the Midlands, said he started adding E-Transits to his fleet in late 2023 and within weeks noticed the route optimisation feature on his telematics platform was generating delivery sequences that would have left drivers stranded with 8% battery in an industrial park outside Coventry. The platform's routing algorithm was built around fuel stops and fuel tank capacity and didn't factor in state of charge, charging station locations, or the fact that a fully loaded E-Transit carrying 900 kilograms of plumbing supplies gets closer to 90 real world miles than the 196 mile WLTP figure Ford puts on the spec sheet. Beckett ended up telling drivers to plan their own routes for the first few months, which defeated the entire purpose of having a dispatch and routing system. "I was paying for telematics that worked on half my fleet," he said. "The electric half was basically running blind."

The CAN bus data problem goes deeper than most fleet managers realise when they first start mixing electric vehicles into an existing operation. A fleet management specialist at gpswox.com explained that the data protocols for battery electric vehicles vary quite a bit between manufacturers and even between model years of the same vehicle, so a platform that correctly reads state of charge from a 2023 Vivaro-e might misread or completely miss the equivalent data from a 2024 Mercedes eSprinter. The specialist noted that some telematics providers have been slow to update their firmware and decoding libraries because the volume of electric vans was too small to justify the engineering investment until recently. That is starting to change now that registrations are climbing, but for operators who bought their first electric vans two or three years ago, the experience has been frustrating enough to make some question whether telematics works for EVs at all.
Temperature is probably the single biggest operational variable that existing platforms handle poorly for electric fleets. A driver running a diesel Transit in December gets maybe 5% worse fuel economy than in July. The same driver in an E-Transit can lose 30 to 40% of usable range in cold weather, partly from battery chemistry and partly because cabin heating draws directly from the traction battery rather than using waste heat from an engine. Rachel Okonkwo, a fleet analyst at a last mile delivery firm based in Leeds, told me she spent most of last winter manually tracking her drivers' state of charge at the start and end of each shift using a spreadsheet because the telematics platform didn't surface that data in a usable way. She had 16 electric vans out of a fleet of around 50 and was losing an average of maybe 40 minutes per vehicle per day to unplanned charging stops that the routing system hadn't accounted for. By February, she was pulling electric vans off longer suburban routes and restricting them to inner city drops under 60 miles, not because the vans couldn't handle the distance in warmer months but because she had no reliable way of predicting range on any given day through the platform she was paying for.

Charging visibility is the other gap that keeps coming up in conversations with operators. Fleet managers running depot based charging, which is most of them at this stage, need to know whether a van was fully charged overnight, whether a charger malfunctioned, whether a driver unplugged early to leave on time, and what the average energy cost per vehicle per week looks like. Some of this data exists in the charging hardware's own management software, typically a separate system from the vehicle telematics, and almost nobody has connected the two. Beckett in the Midlands said he uses three different logins every morning. One for his GPS tracking dashboard, one for the Pod Point charging system at his main depot, and one for the Rolec units at his secondary site. "None of them talk to each other," he said. "I've got better data on my home smart meter." Several larger GPS trackers vendors have announced EV specific features in their 2025 product updates, though the fleet managers I spoke with were openly sceptical about timelines, given that similar promises were made in late 2023, and what actually arrived was limited to basic state of charge readings that updated every few minutes rather than in real time.

I think the real risk here is that fleet managers delay their EV transition, not because the vehicles aren't ready but because the management tools haven't caught up, and every month of delay puts them further behind on ZEV mandate compliance and further from the operational cost savings that electric vans genuinely deliver once you work out how to run them properly. Okonkwo in Leeds said she expects her fleet to be majority electric by 2027, but only if she can manage them from one screen. Beckett was less optimistic. He told me he's asked his telematics vendor three times for a realistic delivery date on full E-Transit battery data integration and received a different answer each time.