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A fleet manager at a building services firm outside Falkirk got told in January to produce an electrification plan for the board by spring. The firm runs 34 vans, most of them on central belt work and a few based further north. What the board asked for was a list of vehicles that could switch to electric at the next renewal without the schedulers noticing any difference. He did not commission a consultant. The trackers went on the vans in 2021 after two break ins at the yard, and until January, the data had only ever been used to confirm arrival times when a customer disputed an invoice. <\/p>\n
February went to the records instead. The previous twelve months of position and ignition history came out of the system into a spreadsheet, and the sorting took him about three weeks of evenings. Several of his assumptions about the daily patterns did not survive the records. Nineteen vans stayed under 85 miles in every working day of the twelve month period, December included. He also struck four vans off the list on the strength of their histories. Eight or nine times over the year, usually when a contract up north needed parts at short notice, those vans had made unplanned runs to Aberdeen, and the logs held every one of those trips.<\/p>\n
Theft and timekeeping were the reasons firms bought the tracking databases in the first place, and live monitoring <\/strong>is still the only thing most of them open the records for. Scottish Water worked through the same question at a larger scale, and the utility has spoken about its method at industry events. Around 180 electric vans now work in the utility\u2019s fleet. Its telematics records covered utilisation and dwell times, enough to flag the vehicles that could switch, and the same data decided the charging arrangement for each one, home, workplace, or a mix. <\/p>\n The exercise cost the utility nothing in new systems. The records it ran on were already accumulating in the system, the same way they accumulate at every fleet with trackers fitted. A van that parks at the same depot from 7pm to 5am gives the operator a ten hour charging window at off peak rates. The awkward vans park on a different street every evening, or tow, or haul a full racking load up the A9 twice a week. Sorting one kind from the other used to be a job for whoever knew the rounds best, and the position history has taken that job over<\/em>. At firms where somebody compared the logs against what the depot believed, the logs won most of the arguments.<\/p>\n The zero emission vehicle mandate required van manufacturers to reach 10 percent electric sales in 2024. The target rises every year until it hits 70 percent in 2030, and for 2025, it stood at 16 percent. Actual battery electric van sales through 2025 came in at about 9.1 percent of the market<\/strong>. Around 40 zero emission van models were on sale by then, more than half of all new van models, and the sales still fell well short of the mandated trajectory.<\/p>\n Charging in Scotland helps the case in some postcodes and undermines it in others. Transport Scotland\u2019s Matthew Eastwood told the first Fleet Scotland strategy meeting in December 2025 that the plan runs to 24000 additional public charge points by 2030. The existing network stands at over 7000 public points, built with more than 65 million pounds of public money, and an earlier target of 6000 was hit two years early. The meeting heard the standing complaints too, range loss in cold weather, upfront cost, and patchy coverage away from the urban hubs. A distribution business near Inverness put the winter question through the same process. Spec sheets had given him one answer about cold weather range<\/em>, and his own tracking records gave him a more useful one. The business trialled two electric vans last winter. The trial vans lost range in the January cold snaps, a fifth to a quarter of it, depending on the week. Three of the eleven routes came out past the limit and will stay on diesel for now.<\/p>\n The analysis now sells as a paid service on its own. One fleet management consultant working with Scottish operators described his standard request to me, a year of GPS history<\/strong>, delivered before he agrees to a site visit. Most clients learn something unwelcome from the history before the first meeting. One haulier client had decided years earlier that electrification could not work for its operation. The records put a third of all its movements on one short shunt, nine miles between two depots, back and forth all year. A courier firm came in from the opposite direction, with money already set aside for a fully electric renewal<\/em>. Its drivers take the vans home overnight to addresses scattered between Perth and Dunfermline, leaving the depot based charging plan covering less than half the fleet. None of this had shown up in the fuel cards, and the mileage claims had hidden it just as well.<\/p>\n Two or three hours of a trades van\u2019s working day can pass stationary with the engine on<\/strong>, powering tools or heating the cab, and the GPS log timestamps every minute. Battery powered cab heat changes that bill, since it draws a small percentage of the energy an idling diesel engine gets through. In the Falkirk fleet, the welfare van idled more than anything else on the books, parked on site for hours at a time with the engine running<\/em>. Everything turns on site charging for that van, and no position data can say whether a power feed will exist on a six month job.<\/p>\n Fourteen electric replacements went into the plan he handed the board in April, phased across two renewal cycles<\/strong>. For twelve of the vans, the paper says diesel and nothing further, with no review built in. The other eight sit in a holding category, waiting for a second year of records to build up. The four vans with the Aberdeen habit are in the diesel group. The welfare van is one of the eight. What has not been decided, by him or anyone else, is the question raised by two vans whose position data shows them parked outside<\/em> the same cafe in Grangemouth every Friday afternoon.<\/p>\n \t <\/div>\n