Revolv’s Mythbusters Series dives into common misconceptions around electric vehicles, offering factual insights to aid fleet owners and operators and help them get the most out of the EV transition.
The myth: no need for single point of accountability for fleet electrification
In part one of “I Don’t Need to Outsource to Electrify My Fleet,” we focused on the bigger picture of the value of an experienced electrification provider, but we wanted to dive deeper into the specifics of why it’s essential to have a single point of accountability for fleet electrification. From ensuring that all the electric vehicles, chargers, and telematics work together to identifying cost-savings and quickly resolving any problems, a partner like Revolv can streamline every aspect of your fleet’s transition to electric.
The fact: interoperability
First off, it is critical to factor in interoperability – ensuring that vehicles work with chargers and other infrastructure – especially when fleets want to maximize uptime. With pre-approved vendors, Revolv helps customers achieve interoperability, while also considering components like route and payload to keep operations running smoothly time after time. While individual vendors are focused on selling their best products, Revolv has a vested interest in ensuring all parts of the system work together.
It all starts with ensuring that the correct vehicles are chosen, which might sound like a no-brainer, but this often arises as the biggest pitfall. Revolv carefully analyzes route information, charging parameters and other critical variables – overseeing the entire process to guarantee constant synergy.
For us, it’s also about making sure the communication is functioning properly across external parties – whether its permitting a power request, or interconnection utility commissioning, or even customer training and schedule management. All of these pieces need to communicate with each other for EVs to operate smoothly, which a single point of accountability can guarantee.
The fact: cost savings
Ensuring interoperability from the beginning saves our customers large sums of money, but there are likely additional facets of daily operations with money-saving opportunities.
For example, something we’ve frequently seen with fleets looking to install more chargers is that they think they need to pay for a utility upgrade when we can help shorten the interconnection timeline so that fleets can install more for less. With Revolv’s proprietary tools and software, fleets can essentially double their capacity while reducing interconnection timelines and costs – just another proof point of how a partner with built-in expertise can advise the best course of action before it’s too late.
On top of those savings, having the right partner can help find cost savings from government grants, federal grants incentives, procurement through utilities, and more. For example, Revolv is working closely with fleets across California to tap into key programs, like California’s CARB’s HVIP Program, to save big in the coming months – and we’re continuing to closely track all the moving pieces, so fleets don’t have to.
The fact: on-call problem solvers
But of course, once an EV fleet is up and running, problems could still occur: A vehicle might not charge properly, the hardware and software may not communicate, and so on. Having an expert to lean on who’s familiar with the products, technologies and overall process can ensure a fleet is maximizing uptime.
Without a single partner, what happens if something goes awry, such as a vehicle that’s not charging? A fleet owner is left to fend for themselves – calling the charger manufacturer, the vehicle manufacturer and/or the utility provider. With Revolv, you have just one number and it’s us. We’re first in line to answer any questions, and our team can quickly troubleshoot the issue, saving hours, days, or even weeks of headaches. Not only does that save fleet owners from going to dozens of different parties, but they might forget a step – forcing them to go back to the beginning.
That’s because we have an entire team dedicated to issue mitigation: from our customer success team to our fleet ops team, we have every single specialty across the whole lifecycle in-house and available for our partners.
The fact: system-wide success
We’re accountable for the entire system’s performance, unlike individual providers who understandably focus on their particular scope of work. We don’t have a product; we have our customers, and we have to care about the entire life cycle or business case breaks down – and that’s why our focus is guaranteeing uptime by squashing problems as soon as they arise.
We make sure to find a solution no matter the problem because we’re invested in your system-wide success; in fact, we have contractual obligations and system-level performance accountability for vehicle performance issues, so our partners can rest easy.