Accelerating Corporate EV Adoption — Fleetcor

I recently sat down with Alexey Gavrilenya and Keagan Russo of Fleetcor about how Fleetcor is accelerating the adoption of electric vehicles. The podcast is embedded below, followed by a short summary of some of the topics we discussed.

You can also listen to the podcast on Anchor, Apple Podcasts/iTunes, Breaker, Google Podcasts, Overcast, Pocket, Podbean, Radio Public, SoundCloud, Spotify, or Stitcher.

To start with, a core Fleetcor offering is a “gas card” of sorts. For me, that quickly brought to mind the 1994 classic Reality Bites, in which Wynona Rider’s character cut herself off from the supervision and support of her parents to live an independent life … but used a gas card her dad had given her to buy all her groceries and daily essentials. Technology has progressed since then, and Fleetcor offers a much more nuanced product. Companies can give their employees these cards and include limitations as to where they can be used, what kinds of products or services they can be used for, etc.

So, what’s all this got to do with electric vehicles? With the transition to electric vehicles, flexible solutions are very helpful, if not critical. Employees don’t want to be shuffling through a handful of charging network cards to charge their work vehicles, and corporations don’t want overly complex billing and accounting processes. Fleetcor makes it easy on both parties by providing a card that can be used for fueling old-school gasmobiles or charging new, fancy EVs — and perhaps other things, if the employer so chooses.

But who is Fleetcor? Is this just a little startup? No, the company has $2.4 billion in annual revenue, 8000+ employees, and operates in more than 100 countries!

Anyone who’s been following the EV market knows that the European EV market has blown up — high percentages of new car sales in Europe are now electric cars, and fleet adoption is leading that trend. With Fleetcor’s extensive business in Europe, it has already learned how to help companies and employees navigate the transition to plugin electric vehicles. The core of the company’s transactions in the Netherlands are already EV charging transactions, Gavrilenya notes. To listen to Gavrilenya and Russo talk much more about these trends, the challenges for drivers, and how Fleetcor is helping to solve the challenges and accelerate the EV revolution, listen to the podcast. You can listen via the SoundCloud embed above or on the various other podcast networks out there.

Another topic we talked about at length that CleanTechnica readers and listeners will surely appreciate and enjoy is total cost of ownership (TCO). As much as I love the many EV TCO analyses we’ve covered over the past decade, Fleetcor dives into TCO at a whole other level of detail.

One more big note from the 40-minute conversation, though, is something Russo said toward the end of the podcast. I asked about which coming electric vehicle models they hear the most chatter about from customers. Right away, Russo knew the answer — the Ford F-150 Lightning. He’s hearing a lot of excitement and interest from fleet managers about that electric truck. Gavrilenya backed up that statement and called this a watershed moment in the EV industry.