Best of LinkedIn: Commercial Fleet Insights CW 40/ 41

00:00:00: Provided by Thomas Allgaier and Freeness, based on the most relevant LinkedIn posts about commercial fleets in calendar weeks forty-and-forty one.

00:00:07: Freenes is a B to D market research company that supports automotive suppliers with building feature-by-feature competitive intelligence That shows exactly how their product stacks up against the competition.

00:00:17: you can find more info in the description.

00:00:19: So looking at this situation right now diesel prices in California just hit nine dollars and ninety-nine cents a gallon.

00:00:26: Yeah

00:00:26: literally maxing out physical pumps.

00:00:29: I mean, they just don't have the digital space for double digits before the decimal.

00:00:32: Which is wild!

00:00:34: But then at that exact same time US heavy-duty electric vehicle registrations fell by nearly forty four percent.

00:00:40: Right which creates this massive paradox of anyone managing logistics.

00:00:44: The economic pressure to abandon diesel has never been higher.

00:00:48: Oh absolutely Hitting physical hardware limits but the procurement data makes it look like the whole industry's throwing in reverse.

00:00:57: Exactly So we are setting expectations right here.

00:01:01: Today, We're unpacking the top commercial fleet trends across LinkedIn for you, The Mobility Professional.

00:01:06: Yeah no fluff just the underlying mechanics of what is actually happening out there?

00:01:10: Where?

00:01:11: really want to cut through their noise and were diving into raw economics.

00:01:15: very real physical bottlenecks holding things back.

00:01:19: how data's fundamentally reorganizing business.

00:01:22: I think the best place to start is unpacking that huge contradiction in the procurement numbers.

00:01:27: Fred de Perez brought this up recently,

00:01:29: right?

00:01:29: The forty three point six percent drop and Q one

00:01:32: yeah.

00:01:33: And i mean if you just glance at consumer ev sales softening In the news and map That onto commercial fleets You'd assume the whole market stalled

00:01:39: which Is easy to do.

00:01:40: but the mechanism behind a fleet dropping out it's Just completely different from a consumer changing their mind into dealership.

00:01:47: totally.

00:01:48: A consumer backs out because interest rates are high or they read a bad headline.

00:01:52: Right, but a fleet's decision is driven by a finance team you know pricing out at ten to twenty year asset and that Decision gets locked in like eighteen months before a single truck even shows up in a registration count.

00:02:03: So

00:02:03: that eighteen month lag is critical here

00:02:05: exactly.

00:02:07: He noted the.

00:02:07: this Q one drop wasn't well It was an economic failure of vehicles themselves.

00:02:12: it was an administrative stall

00:02:14: back paperwork basically

00:02:16: Pretty much.

00:02:17: It came down to incentive uncertainty, freezing budget approvals.

00:02:20: mid-cycle state voucher programs were in flux so the finance directors just hit pause.

00:02:25: Oh wow!

00:02:27: So the trucks might even be built already but they're sitting unregistered because the capital expenditure was built around a rebate.

00:02:33: that...

00:02:33: A rebate?

00:02:34: That vanished yeah.

00:02:35: ...so it's an administrative bottleneck not a physics

00:02:37: problem.

00:02:38: Because of underlying physics and uh operational math its getting aggressively persuasive.

00:02:44: I mean, we mentioned California's pumps maxing out.

00:02:46: But this is a global squeeze.

00:02:48: definitely you walk him.

00:02:51: Losa actually pointed out that in Europe diesel recently hit A record two point two four euros a liter and he frames us perfectly.

00:02:59: You know fleet operators are ruthless for profit entities

00:03:02: right?

00:03:02: They don't care about the PR of green logo on their door

00:03:05: exactly.

00:03:07: if The total cost of ownership on EVs undercuts diesel over five to ten year life cycle they will transition with or without government regulation.

00:03:15: Which you can see, the European Postal Services he highlighted... I mean DHL in Germany is already running about half of its parcel vans on electric.

00:03:23: Half?

00:03:24: That's huge!

00:03:25: Yeah.

00:03:25: and Austrian post is at fifty percent too adding like a thousand more each year.

00:03:30: Swiss posts aiming for all their letters and parcels to be electric by twenty thirty.

00:03:34: And these are organizations running on razor-thin margins per package.

00:03:38: They'd never scaled it fifty percent if was destroying our bottom line

00:03:41: Never.

00:03:42: So let's put some exact mathematical mechanics to that bottom line.

00:03:46: Varun Adibadla shared some operational math from the NYCSB US electric school buses.

00:03:53: They just passed two hundred thousand miles on their fleet.

00:03:56: Okay,

00:03:57: and because a school bus sits idle all night It can basically take advantage of off-peak baseline grid capacity.

00:04:03: The utilities are practically giving that power away at three AM

00:04:06: Because the power plants are generating it anyway in.

00:04:08: nobody is using it right exactly.

00:04:11: So they are paying just twelve cents per kilowatt hour.

00:04:14: When you convert that energy density to the road it translates into running an electric school bus for just eighteen cents per mile.

00:04:21: Wow, wow.

00:04:22: Eighteen cents and what is a diesel bus costing right now?

00:04:25: A full dollar-per-mile operate.

00:04:27: Okay.

00:04:28: so in eighty two cent difference per mile I mean when you multiply that by thousands of miles across hundreds of buses this spreadsheets Just completely break in favor of Electric

00:04:37: Completely.

00:04:38: And the ultimate validation of those spreadsheets just happened.

00:04:41: Richard Savoie brought this to the forefront and Gavin Mooney and Tony Nism discussed it heavily too.

00:04:46: Oh, The FedEx deal?

00:04:47: Yes!

00:04:48: FedEx just committed three hundred million dollars To order two thousand electric box trucks from Harbinger.

00:04:54: They expect each individual truck that saved them twenty thousand dollars a year in fuel alone.

00:04:59: So over-the-projected life Of Those Two Thousand Trucks That's What.

00:05:02: Eight Hundred Million Dollars In Total Operational Savings

00:05:05: Exactly.

00:05:06: But

00:05:07: I want to push on something here because this FedEx deal reveals a massive shift in risk appetite.

00:05:13: They aren't spreading this bet across legacy manufacturers like Ford or Freightliner,

00:05:17: right?

00:05:17: they are going all-in on Harbinger A company that was only founded in twenty twenty two.

00:05:22: yeah it's Like Going All In On The Single Handed Poker Because You've Already Peaked At The Financial Cards.

00:05:29: i mean fedex Is A Logistics Giant Taking On Serious Manufacturing Risk With A Two Year Old Startup.

00:05:35: Well, they're willing to take that manufacturing risk because the duty cycle risk is practically zero for them.

00:05:40: I'm so.

00:05:41: FedEx analyze this specific route profile.

00:05:44: it's highly predictable daily mileage They have a guaranteed return to depot every single night and high utilization rates

00:05:51: till these cases flawless.

00:05:52: Exactly in that specific operational window The business case is so ironclad That protecting their investment You know locking in those eight hundred million dollars in savings justifies financing of young supplier.

00:06:04: I think they even co-led Harbinger's funding round just to make sure the company survives, to build the trucks.

00:06:08: They did?

00:06:10: So...I mean..the vehicles exist The financial teams have signed off The savings are undeniable.

00:06:15: But then you know ..The moment You hand those beautiful spreadsheets To a depot manager ...They hit A massive physical wall.

00:06:22: The electrical grid

00:06:23: Yes!

00:06:24: The bottleneck has completely rotated.

00:06:26: Procuring the vans is no longer the hard part.

00:06:28: The constraint Is securing the charging capacity To actually keep them moving

00:06:33: Right.

00:06:33: Anthony Okuribi really crystallized this.

00:06:36: He said pilot programs aren't failing because the vans break down?

00:06:38: No, they fail Because a fleet orders fifty vans.

00:06:41: They show up in six months But then The local utility says upgrading the transformer is going to take fourteen months.

00:06:48: So you just have A yard full of dead Vans sitting there.

00:06:50: Exactly You literally can't legally or safely plug them In

00:06:54: Which is crazy.

00:06:55: but the market Is responding by simply bypassing the legacy grid entirely.

00:07:00: Okuribudo's company, B Charged is deploying mobile charging directly to fleet yards in sixty days.

00:07:06: Oh wow!

00:07:06: And that just a slow trickle charge?

00:07:09: No they are bringing mobile level two systems for overnight charging and level three direct current fast chargers for mid-shift top ups.

00:07:16: They recently powered two hundred fifty fleet vehicles across fifteen states and not single one of those fleets had finished depot.

00:07:23: That's wild.

00:07:24: They're essentially treating electricity the way we used to treat diesel deliveries, right?

00:07:28: Like just bringing the fuel to the yard on demand instead of waiting a year for a

00:07:32: pipeline.

00:07:33: Exactly and speaking of avoiding massive infrastructure headaches There is a physical reality to installing chargers that gets so overlooked which is trenching.

00:07:42: Oh Trenching as a nightmare.

00:07:44: Right Lucia game in Alley Potter shared a project where con Edison and first student deployed ten electric school buses with bi-directional charging into York.

00:07:53: Okay, bi-directional charging is cool.

00:07:54: But what does that have to do with trenching?

00:07:56: Well the real genius was how they structured the depot.

00:07:59: They managed a cut customer side installation costs by up to twenty percent Simply by avoiding extensive trenching across the yard.

00:08:07: I mean for anyone who hasn't manage it facility upgrade.

00:08:09: Trenching means hiring excavation crews To literally rip off the reinforced concrete of your

00:08:14: active busyard.

00:08:15: Yeah digging deep channels laying heavy PVC conduit pulling high voltage copper to every single parking spot.

00:08:22: It costs thousands of dollars per foot and shuts down your operational lanes for weeks.

00:08:26: So by using bi-directional charging where the buses can push power back to building or balance load locally, they completely avoided having upgrade main utility drop?

00:08:36: That makes sense!

00:08:37: The busses basically act as their own distributed storage network.

00:08:41: Exactly.

00:08:41: But even if you solve concrete AND copper, complexity itself is a totally new frontier.

00:08:48: Yeah, Andre's lips brought up a really terrifying reality for anyone transitioning to electric which is demand charges.

00:08:55: Right Because it's no longer just about how many total kilowatt hours your fleet consumes in a month.

00:09:00: It is intensely focused on when you charge and the maximum speed at which you draw that power.

00:09:06: I always think of it like the plumbing in a massive sports stadium.

00:09:10: Okay How so?

00:09:11: If everyone in a fifty-thousand seat arena tries to flush the toilet at the exact same second during halftime, The entire water system ruptures.

00:09:18: Yeah that would be disaster!

00:09:20: The utility grid works exactly the same way... if a fleet manager finishes his shift at five

00:09:25: p.m.,

00:09:25: and physically plugs into hundred deplete advance simultaneously That massive spike in power draw forces the Utility to fire up expensive peak power plants

00:09:34: And penalize you for this spike?

00:09:36: The utility hits with a peak demand

00:09:38: charge.

00:09:39: Right.

00:09:40: And by the way, if you are finding this breakdown helpful for navigating your own fleets transition take a second to hit subscribe so You don't miss our future deep dives.

00:09:48: Definitely do that because That penalty isn't small.

00:09:52: in A lot of us markets a single fifteen minute spike and power draw can dictate Your utility rate For The entire Month

00:09:59: Just Completely Destroying The Total Cost Of Ownership.

00:10:01: You Promise The Finance Team

00:10:03: Exactly Which Is Why Smart Charging Software Isn'T A Luxury Upgrade?

00:10:07: Anymore?

00:10:07: It's A Mandatory Survival Tool.

00:10:09: The software staggers the charging all night long, so the stadium never flushes at once using your analogy.

00:10:16: Right!

00:10:17: And to that point we are seeing real infrastructure breakthroughs across all types of fleet operations.

00:10:22: Simon Smith noted that the Welch Group they're a ninety-year old family haulier.

00:10:27: They just opened a megawatt scale electric heavy goods hub in Cambridge

00:10:31: Utilizing Vultempo hypercharger technology right?

00:10:34: Yeah So the heavy duty over-the road charging puzzle is actively being solved.

00:10:38: And for lighter commercial fleets that rely on public infrastructure, Garin Nahabedian highlighted Octopus Fleet Boost.

00:10:44: They are cutting UK public charging costs for fleets by thirty percent through a single aggregated

00:10:50: subscription.".

00:10:51: So the drivers aren't out there juggling six different apps and RFID cards?

00:10:55: Exactly!

00:10:56: But you know...the most complex infrastructure challenge might actually be the driveway of The Employee.

00:11:02: Niall Riddell pointed out a partnership between Pawa and Powerverse that's focused entirely on home charging reimbursement.

00:11:08: Oh man, this is a massive compliance headache!

00:11:12: If you set up commercial van home with the technician...and tell them to plug it into their house…how do pay back?

00:11:18: Right because if just give them flat one hundred dollar stipend..the tax authority views that as taxable income in the driver gets penalized.

00:11:25: And ask him submit expense reports.

00:11:27: I mean, you are asking an HVAC tech to figure out exactly which kilowatt hours on their residential bill went into cooking dinner versus charging the company van.

00:11:36: It kills employee morale instantly.

00:11:38: So how were they solving it?

00:11:39: The solution relies entirely on software.

00:11:41: These platforms pull the telemetry directly from the vans onboard charger.

00:11:45: They isolate the exact amount of energy that battery accepted Cross-reference with the driver's specific utility tariff and reimburse them automatically

00:11:54: Without triggering a taxable event.

00:11:56: Exactly, the driver just plugs in and goes to sleep.

00:11:59: But notice what makes all of that possible?

00:12:01: The mobile chargers...the smart depot load balancing....the home reimbursement!

00:12:06: Every single one these physical solutions relies on an invisible pipeline data

00:12:11: which is a perfect transition into our final theme.

00:12:14: Managing commercial fleets today is entirely new discipline.

00:12:17: Mike Brown summarized this perfectly.

00:12:20: He said, the EV transition isn't just swapping diesel for electrons.

00:12:24: It is a fundamental shift from analog operations to digital operations

00:12:28: The data revolution?

00:12:29: We're watching AI, telematics and software completely reorganize how fleets function And it goes way beyond putting a dot on map where our truck is

00:12:38: Right!

00:12:39: Its about securing financial integrity of entire operation.

00:12:43: Chelsea Copeland gave masterclass when discussing the new GeoTab fleet card

00:12:47: Because with diesel hovering near six dollars a gallon.

00:12:50: A lot of places fuel theft is a massive vulnerability.

00:12:53: Huge yeah, and the geotab card creates a digital handshake between The point-of-sale system at the physical fuel pump And the telematics box hardwired into the truck

00:13:03: designed to catch mystery diesel.

00:13:05: right

00:13:05: Exactly.

00:13:06: Say an employee swipes the company card at a gas station in Dallas to buy eighty gallons of diesel, but the Telematics GPS proves that actual truck is sitting on parking lot in Houston.

00:13:16: The pump just instantly declines its transaction?

00:13:18: Yep!

00:13:19: It physically locks out the fraud by forcing the analog purchase to verify itself against digital telemetry.

00:13:25: That's tangible immediate return on investment for installing a Telematic system

00:13:29: For sure.

00:13:31: And with oceans of this data pouring into fleet offices now, we are inevitably seeing this AI software boom attempting to make sense of it all.

00:13:38: Colin McDonald mentioned that Mojo is rebranding to Force Fleet

00:13:42: and they're launching an AI manager called Felix right?

00:13:45: Yeah!

00:13:46: The intent there's really admirable.

00:13:47: They want take raw complex telematics data and translate them in plain English for small business owners

00:13:54: instead Of making a plumbing company owner dig through voltage spreadsheets.

00:13:59: Exactly The AI just tells him truck four is idling too much and wasting fuel, or driver B needs coaching on harsh braking.

00:14:07: But Oliver Batty rightly threw a flag on the play here!

00:14:10: He pointed out that injecting AI into a dashboard doesn't automatically equal insight.

00:14:15: Right If the AIs are throwing more notifications at busy fleet manager.

00:14:20: it's actively making their job worse.

00:14:22: That technology has to do heavy lifting in the background so human only interrupted when definitive action was required.

00:14:29: But here's where it gets really interesting, though.

00:14:32: We are throwing all this AI at the wall but what happens when actual human input is terrible?

00:14:38: How does AI fix a broken analog

00:14:40: process?".

00:14:41: I'll take that caution step further... we're heavily romanticizing what AI can do especially in maintenance bay.

00:14:49: Ganesh Kesari delivered massive reality check on this at TMCAI summit.

00:14:54: What did he say?

00:14:55: He explained that deploying predictive AI for fleet maintenance is essentially useless if you're underlying VMRS data as garbage.

00:15:04: Okay, VMRS – Vehicle Maintenance Reporting Standards For those outside the bay.

00:15:09: this is universal coding language for repairs.

00:15:12: Right Because of one technician types they fix breaks and other types pads And a third type shoes.

00:15:20: A software system thinks these are three completely different failures.

00:15:24: So VMRS gives everyone a unified code so the data can actually be aggregated.

00:15:30: But human behavior fights

00:15:31: the code?

00:15:33: Picture a tired technician at four fifty-five p.m on Friday, they just want to go home!

00:15:38: Oh yeah...they are not filling that out properly.

00:15:41: Exactly They scribble half filled repair order Skip the VMRS drop down menus Leave out exact part numbers and close ticket

00:15:51: In.

00:15:51: no predictive AI model in existence can outrun that bad analog data coming off the shop floor.

00:15:57: Kisari's core argument is, before you ask AI to predict a transmission failure three weeks in advance... You must first use AI to automate and clean the data capture process for the technician in real time!

00:16:09: You cannot build a digital twin of your fleet on a foundation of Friday afternoon handwriting Exactly.

00:16:14: And this exposes really profound human element into this whole technological shift.

00:16:19: Nathan Schaefer brought it up.

00:16:20: He argued that this disconnect between clean software data and messy physical reality is exactly why former wrench-turning technicians make the most effective fleet managers.

00:16:30: Because they possess the physical intuition, That algorithm fundamentally lacks

00:16:35: Exactly.

00:16:36: A former technician reads a simple preventative maintenance ticket And knows instinctively you know, that it's actually a deferred repair just waiting to explode on the highway.

00:16:44: Right they understand the physics of why a truck with low mileage but really high idle time is going aware out differently.

00:16:51: Well an algorithm just flags its as Low Mileage A manager brought in from outside industry who has never turned a wrench.

00:16:58: They have no choice But blindly trust dashboard.

00:17:01: Corporate leadership skills transfer nicely but fleet intuition does not.

00:17:05: And that lack of intuition is dangerous in the shop, but it can be absolutely catastrophic.

00:17:10: In the boardroom when executives are selecting the enterprise software That runs the entire organization.

00:17:15: Yeah Dr Michael Sue's offered a very stark warning about The business dynamics and fleet management software right now?

00:17:21: The industry Is currently obsessed with buy-and-build acquisitions.

00:17:25: A massive private equity firm buys up three or four smaller telematics platforms Intense to merge them into one dominant system and sell the combined business at a premium.

00:17:35: Ah,

00:17:35: the classic Silicon Valley roll-up.

00:17:37: It always sounds incredible in The Pitch Deck!

00:17:40: Just slap a single sign on screen over everything and call it an integrated

00:17:43: platform.".

00:17:44: But that physical reality of commercial fleets completely shatters That pitch deck.

00:17:49: Seuss points out that migrating thousands Of trucks from one legacy back end to another takes years.

00:17:55: He notes it can often take up To seven years.

00:17:58: Wait really?

00:17:59: Why does this software update Take seven years?

00:18:02: Because you aren't just pushing code over the air to an iPhone, You are dealing with physical hardware hardwired deep inside heavy machinery.

00:18:10: Oh

00:18:10: right

00:18:11: Sometimes the legacy telematics boxes run on deprecated three G networks and physically cannot accept a new firmware To migrate this software.

00:18:20: You have to wait for the customer to physically bring that specific revenue-generating truck into a workshop, rip apart the dashboard and swap the box.

00:18:29: And you cannot schedule fifty thousand shop visits overnight!

00:18:50: simply canceling their contracts and leaving.

00:18:52: during these drawn out migrations, it frequently undermines the entire financial case for the merger

00:19:00: in.

00:19:18: it always comes back to the physical reality of The Yard.

00:19:21: It really does!

00:19:22: So what is this all mean for you and your operations as you navigate this transition?

00:19:27: We've explored how record diesel prices are providing the ironclad math to justify EV procurement,

00:19:33: we have seen how the grid is forcing fleets to completely rethink trenching... ...and embrace mobile or smart charging-to-survive demand penalties…

00:19:40: And we've uncovered that AI software was completely bottlenecked by analog human inputs and the physical limitations of hardware migration.

00:19:49: So here is a final thought for you to mull over,

00:19:51: okay?

00:19:52: The entire industry is obsessing over replacing the physical trucks swapping out the diesel engine or battery pack but...the ultimate winners in this mobility transition might actually be organizations that master invisible infrastructure.

00:20:07: Yeah data pipelines smart charging algorithms avoid grid penalties

00:20:12: Exactly the integration platforms that force all these disparate pieces to actually talk to each other cleanly.

00:20:18: The role of a traditional fleet manager is rapidly evolving into an energy and data manager, so are you in your organization ready for that skill shift?

00:20:28: If you enjoyed this episode new episodes drop every two weeks.

00:20:31: also check out our other editions on charging and battery technology.

00:20:35: autonomous mobility markets software defined AI-defined vehicles.

00:20:40: Thanks for joining us as we unpacked the physical reality behind digital headlines.

00:20:45: Don't forget to subscribe and catch our

00:20:48: next breakdown!