Hello everybody, welcome to another edition of C&F Talks. Today, it's a great pleasure to have with me Dr Angus Webb, who's the Founder and CEO of Dynamon. Angus, welcome.

Nice to be here, nice to meet you.

Very good to have you here, it's very good to have your firm's sponsorship of our upcoming EV Infrastructure Summit on the 2nd of June in Canary Wharf. Whilst I know that you won't be speaking yourself, I know some of your colleagues will be. Let's turn to our first question if we may, Angus.

What are the biggest challenges fleets face when transitioning to electric vehicles?

Well, decarbonisation in the commercial transport industry presents quite a lot of risk to fleets and this future solution, whether it's electric vehicles or alternative fuels, has very different economics to the old diesel world. And as a result of that, moving into this new solution could have operational or financial risks that fleets need to properly understand before they can do it at scale. And so, a lot of fleets have started their journey by investing maybe at a small scale to learn about the technology, but very few have gone all in into the transition to electric vehicles.

And that's because they're still not fully able to understand what solution they will be implementing. And various stakeholders in the fleets, whether it's the fleet manager, can be sure that the operation will run smoothly, or the financial director know that the costs are properly understood. And so therefore, it's very difficult for fleets to make the full-scale transition to electric vehicles.

And I believe that this is one of the major challenges holding back the transition. And actually, whilst the solutions are there, it's the lack of knowledge and the lack of implementation insights that are actually holding back fleets making that transition and adopting the technology that is there available today. Now, of course, there's going to be further developments in the future that are going to make it significantly less risky.

But that lack of information, that lack of knowledge is one of the biggest challenges right now. But there are a few areas where we're going to see improvements, the vehicles will get better, the rollout of public charging infrastructure will get better, there will be more grid connectivity at depots, etc, etc. All of these things, all of these challenges will be overcome. But yeah, the lack of understanding, lack of knowledge is the biggest one today.

So, it's really a matter of time, the market absorbing what's going on, understanding the various developments, which hopefully our conference will help alleviate to some extent.

How does infrastructure, both depot and public, impact the fleet electrification decisions?

Well, it's 50% of the solution. And so, you can't have an electric fleet without infrastructure. And I think the vehicle technology is maturing quite well.

In the smaller vehicle domain, the van, the car space, it's pretty much mature, you could say, the vehicles perform very well, very reliable. And so therefore, the new territory is rolling out scaled infrastructure. And so, fleets will want to conduct their operations in the same way in the future that they have done in the past.

And so therefore, they don't want to be stopping and adding additional downtime for charging. So, when the vehicles are stopped in the depot, they're going to want to charge in the depot. And therefore, that means fleets are going to have to invest in depot infrastructure, that's a new procurement that they probably haven't made before.

And that's going to involve different departments of businesses coming together and planning that out. And it's also going to require probably grid connection, upgrades, etc. So, these are challenges that need to be overcome.

This is knowledge that needs to be gained by businesses. And therefore, it's events like this event and also working with companies like Dynamon to gain that knowledge to have a plan that is detailed and tailored to the operation. And that presents a cost-effective solution is really important.

Maurice

I mean, talking about Dynamon, how are you actually supporting fleets with your data-driven planning and simulation technologies?

So, fleets need a plan. That plan needs to be tailored to their operation. It needs to be fit for their operation and their business needs.

That plan also needs to not cost a fortune in itself. Decarbonisation is more expensive in these early days, but we'll have a return on investment in the future. And what we've done is we've invested heavily in our technology at Dynamon, our simulation technology, our software, so that we can provide fleet decarbonisation plans at a fraction of the cost of traditional consultancies.

We don't have a lot of human hours in the process collecting and processing data. We've built automation and software that can solve that problem. And so, we provide fleet decarbonisation planning reports for a very small fee that can be turned around very rapidly through our integrations with telematics companies, fleet routing providers, and so then can provide tailored reports to fleets in a matter of days. That's our real focus as a business is how we get decarbonisation planning into the fleets to unlock that knowledge gap at a fraction of the price.

Maurice

And presumably that very interesting report you published not long ago on fleet decarbonisation planning, that gives people some sort of overview of this process. Could you just tell us a bit more about that report and what impact it's likely to have on the transport industry?

Okay, so a fleet needs to sort of tick quite a few boxes. There's a lot of stakeholders in a fleet that need to be brought along the journey of decarbonisation. Obviously, the sustainability goals of a business.

Now, sustainability or decarbonisation might be mandated by law. So, if you're operating smaller vehicles, from today and into the future, you can't just go and buy 100% diesel vehicles anymore, you have to buy some electric. And so therefore, that mandate is having an impact on your business.

You also have to convince the operations director or the fleet manager that the future fleet will operate reliably. And so therefore, the need to understand is the existing downtime of the diesel vehicles enough downtime to charge the future electric vehicles? Or are they going to need to introduce new downtime, whether it's stopping a public network or spending longer in the depot to charge, is that going to have any business disruption?

And then you've also got the financial aspect of it, that the cost of the fleet needs to be fully understood from the cost of the vehicles themselves, to the cost of the charging equipment to the cost of the electricity that you're going to be purchasing, and that you're doing everything you can to minimise that cost. So, our decarbonisation planning reports go through those three key areas and make sure that the solution is optimised for sustainability, it needs to be saving CO2, otherwise, it's not doing its job. It needs to be operating reliably, and it needs to be cost effective.

Absolutely. I mean, clearly, this is one of the most fundamental parts of decarbonising transport as a whole to tackle the fleet issue. So that's very interesting.

For our viewers, there'll be more on this at the conference itself. So just to remind you, that's the EV Infrastructure Summit on the 2nd of June in Canary Wharf in London. Further information available from our website: www.cityandfinancial.com.

Angus, thank you very much for that very interesting discussion.

Thank you very much.