Beyond Electrification: How to Achieve True Fleet Sustainability

Discover actionable best practices and strategies for sustainable fleet operations in this blog post. From electrification to route optimization, learn how to make your fleet more efficient and environmentally friendly.

Sustainable transportation is a common goal shared by many leaders in the mobility industry. We all seek ways to lower our carbon footprint and ensure a better future. In this blog post, we will look into strategies and best practices you can employ to improve fleet sustainability across different verticals and look beyond electrification into steps that can be implemented immediately.  

A shift to electric vehicles is a popular choice for many fleet operators looking to reduce their carbon footprint. As a general rule, you can expect an overall emissions reduction of between 40% to 80% when adopting an EV fleet. But there is no catch-all formula to tell you how much lower your carbon footprint will be, due to regional variability in how electricity is produced. After a successful transition, you can increase these carbon savings even more, by optimizing your fleet for higher utilization rates.      

But electrification is a complex and costly process, and there are other tools for fleet managers to use with their existing ICE vehicles that can lead to major improvements in sustainability. Not only do these help the planet, they also improve fleet performance and profits. Let’s look at these opportunities by industry.  

Optimization is the best tool to combat climate change

Allowing fleet professionals to leverage just the existing assets to do more business has a huge impact on the environment. A smaller fleet means fewer resources taken from the environment (and a lower fleet TCO). So one of the most effective ways to become sustainable is planning and optimizing fleet operations. Alternatively, you can utilize the existing fleet to expand your operations. Doing more without expending additional resources.  

For taxi and ride hailing companies, this can mean leveraging assets from existing fleets to serve other mobility demand sources, like non-emergency medical transport (NEMT) or last mile delivery, allowing more sustainable ride services like pooling. This additional utilization, paired with optimized dispatching and AI based placement, decreases deadhead miles and can increase revenue by 15-40%. 

Additionally, routes can be optimized for lower fuel consumption and distance saving. Our experience shows that by optimizing routes alone an ICE Taxi can save up to 6% of its carbon emissions per-trip!  

‍Logistics and delivery companies stand to gain even more from the ability to optimize and plan operations. Especially when given the ability to re-optimize after the planned dispatching and routing has been set. Being responsive to changing conditions like cancelled pickups or drop offs, drivers shifts, live events, and additional orders. 

An advanced dispatching solution can enable the creation of multimodal delivery solutions, making sure the right vehicle is assigned to the right task, saving on distance (time), reducing fuel consumption and allowing the integration of zero emission vehicles like cargo bikes into the logistical framework. 

Shared mobility allows the use of vehicles only when they are needed. It is lauded by many as a tool to reduce congestion, CO2 emissions, and other impacts on the environment. It includes car sharing, bike sharing, and more.  

For shared mobility to work, however, one must make sure vehicles are clean and available where passengers need them. 

It is important to make the most of every touch point - rebalancing to make vehicles arrive in high demand areas, or, offering dynamic pricing that allows shared mobility operators to offer discounts for vehicles in low demand areas - encouraging passengers to “bring them in” themselves. 

Rebalancing is a useful technique to ensure that vehicles are optimally utilized. However, it does entail environmental costs. Using advanced optimization, you can avoid unnecessarily moving vehicles from low-demand areas when it is pointless to do so. For example, if a high-demand area is already saturated, or if we predict that demand in the area where the vehicle is now, will peak again in a couple of hours.

For both shared mobility and traditional rental companies, avoiding downtime by automating vehicle tasks, allowing better service with a smaller fleet. 

Don’t wait to become more sustainable

By replacing traditional ICE vehicles with electric-powered ones (EVs), fleets can make significant progress towards achieving net-zero emissions. Electrification can also bring financial benefits, such as reducing a fleet's total cost of ownership (TCO) and enjoying financial incentives in the form of tax rebates and subsidies. 

But there is no need to wait for the implementation of an electric fleet to become sustainable. By optimizing capabilities and simulating their real impact on the environment and improving fleet KPIs, you can make your fleet more sustainable, starting today!