Peter McDonald
Some of us are better with figures – and money – than others. But the Ohme man is here to help do some number-crunching to help achieve efficiency excellence
What were you doing in 2011? Younger, fitter, slimmer, possibly with more hair and less of it being grey – 2011 might feel recent, but it’s almost a decade and a half ago. Scary, eh?
I’m not trying to make you feel old, but just as we’ve changed in that time, so has the car market – almost beyond recognition. For starters, 2011 was the year that diesel became the majority fuel type for the first time and the best-selling car was the now-extinct Ford Fiesta.
For business drivers however, 2011 was the year that the approved mileage allowance payments were set at 45p per mile for petrol and diesel cars. By comparison, some 1,200 fully electric cars were sold in the UK in 2011 – quite a jump from the 250 sold in 2010, but still tiny compared to today. It’s a snapshot of a different era and the market for new car sales and the fleet market has moved on considerably.
And with that change, what has also had to move on is the subject of driver reimbursement. That picture of 2011 shows just how much things have progressed in the fleet industry. Back then, the fleet and retail sectors were fairly black and white, and easy to differentiate. Today, however, you’ve got numerous shades in-between such as with the grey fleets of salary sacrifice.
Then there’s also the question of reimbursement. Those mileage allowance payments might have been set some time ago, but the price of a litre of petrol or diesel doesn’t change that much, even if you shop around from the cheapest to the most expensive locations. Leaving aside the likes of motorway service stations, the difference might be a handful of pence per litre. Worth doing obviously, but it’s never going to make you rich.
It’s a very different matter when it comes to EVs though. When charging an electric car, at home one of your drivers might be paying as little as 7p per kWh on a tariff such as Intelligent Octopus Go. However, if they need an ultra-rapid charge at a public charger while out on the road, they could easily end up paying 85p/kWh or more – 12 times more than what they would pay for the same amount of electricity at home. It’s the equivalent of a litre of unleaded costing £1.43 or £17.16!
That level of cost differentiation means there’s a good case to be made that a strong reimbursement programme is probably even more important for EVs rather than ICE vehicles. The first step that a fleet manager needs is a solution in place for both home and public charging.
Some 1,200 fully electric cars were sold in the UK in 2011 – quite a jump from the 250 sold in 2010, but still tiny compared to today
I’ve written before about the importance and cost advantages of fleets providing their drivers with home chargers. Not only is the upfront cost of the chargers quickly repaid via the savings of charging at home, but also there’s the saved employee downtime of not using public chargers too. Furthermore, it means that the fleet manager can choose a home charger for their employee that is ‘reimbursement-ready’ such as our chargers at Ohme that will not just cover them for today but also future-proof them for any changes coming on the horizon – especially such as the CO2 reporting being introduced on 1 January 2026.
Using Ohme’s in-house systems as an example, we have a fleet portal that can work alongside a fleet manager’s reimbursement software from the likes of Allstar or Octopus’s Electroverse. This provides them with high-quality data to enable the best levels of information and reimbursement processes available for home charging. For the driver themselves, it also means that they could even be reimbursed for their home charging costs for their business mileage before they’ve even received their electricity bill.
As home energy tariffs become more and more complex and dynamic, so the quality of the data provided for home EV charging will become more and more important – making it crucial that they choose a home charging partner that can provide the best level of data possible. The best reimbursement programmes also have provision for public charging too, so that a fleet manager only needs one account to cover public and home charging and they can also see the full details of each driver’s mileage, movements and efficiency across their entire fleet.
Along with the car market and the knowledge base of fleet managers, reimbursement programmes have also moved on since 2011.
Peter McDonald is mobility director at Ohme. Prior to his current role, he spent two decades working for automotive manufacturers including Nissan, SEAT and the wider Volkswagen Group.
