Feature
AER rates: acknowledging reality As barmy as EV fables can be, there are legitimate concerns about charging costs and reimbursements unique to fleet that, if unchecked, could easily feed more general rhetoric about high running costs. As Alphabet’s Sandall-Mansergh explains, advisory electric rates (AERs) often come up short if drivers – some of whom may have little choice in the matter – do a lot of public charging. “Mileage reimbursement is obviously particular to fleets, and the AER rates are generally
Above: Caroline Sandall-Mansergh, manager for consultancy and channels, Alphabet
that wanted to see them fail because people just naturally don’t like change.”
“I was at an OEM at the time and we were communicating 0% BIK,” adds charge point firm Ohme’s director, Peter McDonald, who was Nissan’s fleet boss at the start of the pandemic, responsible for corporate sales of the Leaf electric hatchback. “No one really knew what [percentage] BIK they were paying, so when it went to zero, that wasn’t a number lots of people recognised. “It was 1 April, we’d gone into lockdown weeks prior… and it was really hard, because there were so many other really odd things going on with Covid. It was kind of, ‘what is this number, how does it make
quite low. If you are not mostly charging at home, then, invariably, you’re going to have months when you struggle to claim back enough to cover expenses… [and] company car populations do talk to each other for positive and negative reasons, especially if you’ve got people who consistently feel they’re out of pocket.” AERs were seven pence per mile (ppm) at the time of writing – enough to more than cover home charging costs of 5.65ppm, according to the AA’s EV Recharge Report for March, but well short of the 11.3ppm for an 8kW public charger and 17.63ppm for an 150kW-plus ultra rapid charger and everything in between. Sandall-Mansergh’s advice is to acknowledge it. “I think you need to listen to those very valid and substantiated concerns about the gap. You either choose to carry on ignoring it, or say, ‘is there something short-term we can do in terms of a cash top-up?’… and you might have to pay NIC on it. “You don’t want to be doing that for very long [and] what fleets should really be aspiring
towards is being able to reimburse people based on actual costs. It’s not particularly easy, and if you don’t have a decent internal resource and mechanisms to manage all that data, you then look at an outsourced service.”
sense and how do you respond to it?’ – and it wasn’t in a vacuum. It was happening in a world with lots of other events.”
Hollick thinks the situation is better than it was then and believes used car buyers are now more in need of an EV education than fleets. Others agree that the edge has come of the nuttiest of the stories as the vehicles have become more popular, but think the residual effect is still in session. Edwards
says the “damage is done,” while Sandall-Mansergh suggests we “still feel the echoes of some of the myths at the more ridiculous end of the scale”.
True lies
Then there are the stories, the responses and the practices that, while not necessarily malicious or designed to spread lies, are just plain daft. Edwards points out the softer end – the now-flawed range
www.businesscar.co.uk | May/June 2025 | 23
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32 |
Page 33 |
Page 34 |
Page 35 |
Page 36 |
Page 37 |
Page 38 |
Page 39 |
Page 40 |
Page 41 |
Page 42 |
Page 43 |
Page 44 |
Page 45 |
Page 46 |
Page 47 |
Page 48 |
Page 49 |
Page 50 |
Page 51 |
Page 52 |
Page 53
