Automotive Business Magazine – Q2 2026 – Digital edition - Magazine - Page 48
OPI N I O N
FLEET
EV rental isn’t a
vehicle problem
→ Jake Matthews is managing director at Just Vehicle Solutions
T
he electric vehicle (EV)
conversation in fleet circles
often focuses on vehicle
range, driver acceptance,
or purchase price. All are
important. But in short-term
rental, none of those are the
real constraint.
The real bottleneck is
charging infrastructure and how it fits
into the daily operational rhythm of a
rental business.
From the outside, EV rental looks
straightforward. Cars come back. Cars
go out. Plug them in overnight and
repeat. On the ground, it is far messier.
The problem of turnaround
With a combustion vehicle, turnaround
is predictable. Vehicle returns. It is
checked, cleaned, refuelled in minutes,
and ready for the next customer. EVs
change that equation.
A returned vehicle may need several
hours on charge before it is usable
again. That charging time is not flexible
when bookings are fixed and customer
expectations are tight.
The vehicle may be physically present
but commercially unavailable. That
difference sounds small, until it stacks up
across a fleet.
Consider a typical small rental
operator. 10 EVs return on a Thursday
evening. 10 vehicles are booked out
early Friday morning. The depot has two
chargers. Even if every charger works
perfectly, even if vehicles arrive with a
reasonable state of charge, even if staff
are on-site late, there is a hard physical
limit to how many vehicles can be turned
around in time.
This is not a policy issue or
a sustainability debate. It is a
throughput problem.
Smaller operators feel it first
Large national operators can absorb
inefficiency. Smaller rental firms cannot.
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AUTOMOTIVE BUSINESS Q2 2026
Grid upgrades are slow and expensive.
Additional chargers require space many
depots do not have. Urban locations face
power constraints long before they face
vehicle shortages.
The result is that EV adoption becomes
uneven. Not because operators are
resistant, but because the infrastructure
curve lags behind operational reality.
The hidden cost
Charging time is often treated as neutral.
In rental, it is not.
Every hour a vehicle sits waiting for
charge is an hour it cannot earn. On
short-term hire, utilisation matters more
than almost anything else.
A vehicle that misses a booking due to
charging delays is not just inconvenient.
It directly erodes margin. This is rarely
captured in headline EV cost comparisons.
What moves the needle
The solution is not to slow EV adoption. It
is to be honest about what supports it.
That means:
Planning charging capacity before
fleet expansion
Modelling peak return and collection
patterns, not averages
Accepting that EVs require different
operational buffers than ICE vehicles
Technology can help here. Smarter
scheduling, better forecasting of return
clusters, and prioritised charging
allocation all reduce friction.
But none of that works without
sufficient physical infrastructure.
Closing Thought
EV rental will scale. There is no doubt
about that. But it will not scale on
optimism alone.
Until charging infrastructure is treated
as a core operational asset rather than a
bolt-on, rental fleets will continue to feel
pressure in places spreadsheets do not
always show.
