The hidden productivity hit of public charging for electric van fleets

Electrifying van fleets for drivers without off‑street parking moves “fuel logistics” from the margins of the day into paid working hours. The result is a hidden productivity cost of public charging for electric van fleets that most TCO models still treat as an externality rather than a design constraint, particularly for light commercial vehicles dependent on public charging.

Key takeaways: the hidden productivity cost of public charging for electric van fleets

• ICE refuelling was largely handled off‑shift or at natural breaks; EV public charging often occupies core working time for van drivers.
• Public charging pushes fleets from quick, anywhere refuelling to slower, location‑specific sessions, increasing schedule rigidity and downtime for electric LCVs.
• Fleets have moved from “fuel as background task” to “charging as scheduled activity”, but the labour cost is rarely accounted for in EV fleet TCO models.
• For drivers without home or depot charging, this time shift can erase a meaningful slice of the economic benefit of going electric.
• Treating time‑at‑charger as a first‑class metric should be as central as range or energy price in fleet electrification and decarbonisation decisions.

Main analysis: how public charging creates a hidden productivity cost for electric van fleets

The key change with electric vans is not just the energy source; it is when and where the energy logistics happen. With diesel, refuelling could usually be wrapped around the working day: fill up at the depot, on the way home, or during an existing break, with a 5–10 minute stop almost anywhere. Studies of fleet refuelling show that a typical off‑route fuel stop adds around 20 minutes to trip time, including detour and pump time; it is an annoyance, but it is short, predictable, and easily pushed to the edges of shifts (for example, Geotab’s analysis of off‑route fuelling time: Geotab CV Show briefing and fleet refuelling white paper).

Electric vans, particularly for drivers who park on‑street, invert that logic. When you depend on public chargers, you are tied to specific locations, variable availability, and inherently longer charging sessions. Research on commercial EV operations and urban freight makes clear that charging strategy directly shapes operational schedules: charging windows, charger placement, and power levels all constrain how routes are planned and when vehicles can move (see “Electric vehicle charging strategies for urban freight transport”: T&F open access paper). In practice, this means that a large share of “refuelling” is no longer something you quietly do on the way home; it is something you do in the middle of the working day, on the clock.

For drivers without off‑street parking or reliable depot access, there is often no realistic option to shift charging back off‑shift. UK electric van studies highlight how many van drivers park on‑street and rely on a patchwork of daytime public and rapid chargers because on‑street residential infrastructure is incomplete and home charging is not an option (for example the UK government’s “Commercial electric vans and fleets: adoption, smart charging and barriers”: DESNZ/DFT research). At the same time, analyses of EV logistics and refuelling point out that public sites are usually in different places from traditional fuel stations and require longer connection times—20–45 minutes for a meaningful top‑up is normal, not exceptional. That is a fundamentally different time profile to a 10‑minute diesel stop wrapped around a shift.

Seen this way, the hidden productivity cost of public charging for electric van fleets is straightforward: we have taken a task that used to be flexed into off‑shift dead time and moved it into productive hours without changing how we value it. Most time‑use and smart charging work focuses on total charging duration and grid impact, not on whether that time lands inside or outside paid working hours. Fleet guidance tends to talk about charger uptime, utilisation, and peak‑shaving, but says very little about “paid minutes per week spent travelling to, waiting at, and plugged into public chargers”. Yet that is the number that ultimately determines how many field jobs a team can complete per day.

This is exactly the sort of constraint that should sit inside a fleet TCO model rather than outside it. If you want to see what happens when you push fuel logistics into the working day, plug your own assumptions into the Fleet TCO model for hydrogen and electric fleets and the Commercial Fleet TCO Calculator, and treat “charging time” as a real cost, not a rounding error.

Why the hidden productivity cost of public charging for electric van fleets matters

The distinction between off‑shift and on‑shift logistics is where the economics change. When fuelling happens off‑shift, the main costs are energy and a small amount of incidental time. When charging happens during core working hours, the main cost is labour: every minute at a public charger is a minute not spent on revenue‑generating or service‑critical work. That labour cost is wage plus overhead, which for skilled field staff is often higher than the energy cost of the charge itself.

Traditional fuel logistics for fleets recognised this. There is a long history of on‑site fuelling and depot tanks precisely because operators wanted refuelling to happen where vehicles were parked, before or after shifts, so that drivers did not spend paid time at third‑party forecourts. Analyses of off‑site refuelling costs show that even short detours and 30‑minute stops add up quickly when multiplied across a fleet (for example Geotab’s quantified refuelling impact: Booster/Geotab white paper). In the EV conversation, we have imported the language of “convenience” and “range confidence” from private cars and applied it to fleets, but without the same discipline about keeping logistics off the clock.

For utilities and service fleets, this hidden productivity cost of public charging for electric van fleets matters because field productivity is the lever that funds everything else. If you quietly move 30–60 minutes of “fuel logistics” into each driver’s day, you either need more staff, more overtime, or fewer jobs completed. None of that shows up in a simple “diesel vs electricity per mile” comparison. The more honest framing is: have we designed an electrification strategy that preserves the principle that energy logistics should happen at the margins of the working day, or have we normalised putting charging right in the middle of it?

Most fleet decarbonisation numbers look convincing until you try to run them in the real world. That is why the Fleet Decarbonisation Strategy work and the real‑world Fleet TCO calculator start from workload and operating constraints, including downtime, rather than from an idealised vehicle swap.

The real constraint behind the hidden productivity cost of public charging for electric van fleets

On paper, the constraints are familiar: limited charger availability, uneven on‑street provision, and grid capacity at depots. In practice, for drivers without off‑street parking, the binding constraint is time windows. Public chargers are available when and where they are available; if that does not line up with the edges of a shift, charging migrates into the middle of the workday. That is why even relatively small changes to charging strategy—adding workplace or depot‑adjacent charging, or limited on‑street infrastructure near staff homes—can have outsized productivity effects.

Work comparing workplace, home, and public charging mostly highlights cost differences. For example, Fuuse’s analysis of over one million sessions shows workplace charging to be substantially cheaper than public AC and DC charging (Fuuse workplace charging study). But those same studies point out a second advantage: at‑work charging lets vehicles plug in while people are doing their jobs, eliminating dedicated trips to charge. From a logistics perspective, that is exactly the old on‑site diesel tank logic in electric form: put the energy where the vehicles are when people are working or when they are off‑shift, not where they have to detour mid‑day to top up.

Right now, many UK fleets are in an uncomfortable middle ground. They do not yet have universal depot or workplace charging, on‑street coverage is incomplete, and a non‑trivial fraction of drivers cannot install home chargers (see the UK government’s van fleet research: adoption and smart charging report). Industry surveys suggest that a very high share of electric van drivers would be reliant on on‑street public charging in the absence of home chargers (for example Vauxhall’s “Electric Streets of Britain” findings: EV Powered coverage). In that gap, public chargers—often in car parks and retail sites—take up the slack, and fuel logistics quietly move into the working day.

Implications of the hidden productivity cost of public charging for electric van fleets

For entrepreneurs, the opportunity is in tools and services that explicitly minimise on‑shift charging, not just optimise energy cost. That includes telemetry‑based analytics that quantify “fuel logistics in working hours”, routing software that schedules charging at the real margins of shifts, and infrastructure products that put chargers where off‑shift or at‑work charging can absorb the load. There is also space for business models that bundle on‑street or near‑home charging for fleet drivers as a service, priced against the avoided labour time at public chargers.

For investors, it means looking at charging assets through a productivity lens. Chargers that reliably convert on‑shift public charging into off‑shift or at‑work charging are doing more than selling kilowatt‑hours; they are arbitraging labour costs. For policymakers, the message is that the on‑street vs car‑park vs depot balance is not just about fairness or grid impact; it directly affects how much of the energy transition gets funded by invisible productivity losses. Targeted support for workplace and near‑home charging for LCV drivers is a productivity policy as much as a climate policy.

If you are trying to make this concrete for your own fleet—trucks or vans—the quickest way is to use the Fleet TCO model and the Commercial Fleet TCO Calculator, and deliberately stress‑test scenarios where a proportion of your drivers cannot charge at home. Then layer in a realistic estimate of time spent at public chargers during working hours and see what happens to your true cost of decarbonisation.