A-to-Z EV Rally: Team Tusker

The countdown to the EV Rally has begun, and in anticipation, GREENFLEET catches up with Kit Wisdom, managing director of Tusker, to find out how the team is planning to navigate the challenge of driving around 1,400 miles in an electric vehicle, over five days

We are delighted that Tusker is joining us on the EV Rally for the first time this year. Could you tell us why you decided to participate?

We are and always have been real advocates of electric vehicles and are talking to drivers every day about their benefits. With thousands of drivers taking an electric car on the Tusker salary sacrifice scheme every month, and also a lot of myths in the press, it seems like now is the ideal time for us to join the EV rally to continue to highlight how salary sacrifice is a really affordable way to drive electric and also help dispel some of those myths that are out there.

Please tell us about Team Tusker - who will be driving and in what vehicles?

We’ve had so much interest that our team is made up of individuals from across the business and across all departments. We’re still finalising who drives when and who the navigators are, but we’ll have a great team. We really wanted to promote those cars that are affordable to all and so this year we’ll be driving an Atto 3 courtesy of our friends at BYD and an EX30 from Volvo which are really popular on our scheme.

The Rally is over 1,400 miles and this year will be visiting towns and checkpoints from A to Z in alphabetical order. What do you expect the challenges to be, and are you going into the Rally with a strategy?

We have some great cars in the Atto 3 and the EX30 with really good ranges, driven by people who know how to get the most from their EV, so we don’t expect any significant challenges.

At the moment all we want to do is have a lot of fun and be able to raise awareness of the benefits of driving electric and busting those myths we mentioned earlier.

However, I’m sure once the team are in the cars a competitive edge will also come into play, particularly over who can be the most efficient! I think for us, we’ll want to have some plan of fast charging locations with a plan A, B and C in mind. Plus, in the lead up we’ll be talking to as many people as possible who have previously taken part for any tips, so we make the most of the week-long experience.

Is there a particular message you will be promoting on the rally?

Salary sacrifice is one of the most affordable ways to drive an electric car and is helping more people than ever before to make the switch to electric. There’s also still a lot of misconceptions in the mainstream media, and one of those is about usability on road trips and how they can work for everyday journeys. We plan to dispel those myths with this rally over the course of the 1,400 miles.

However, it’s also important for us to recognise that pure EVs may not be suitable for everyone straightaway and although it’s important for us to educate on that it’s also important for us to keep drivers mobile and also offer other ULEV options, such as hybrids, through salary sacrifice while they consider their journey to electric and maybe use a hybrid as that stepping stone before making a complete transition to electric in the future.

Why are events like the EV Rally important for driving up electric-vehicle adoption?

There’s still a group of people who are on the fence about EVs and whether they can work for their lifestyles. We’re on a mission to help as many people into an EV as possible, and would love to show people how they can slot an EV into their lives without any substantial changes – it’s really just a case of a little forward planning for most of us, which hopefully the rally will help us demonstrate.

Please tell us about TUSKER's own sustainability plans and progress?

Reducing the impact on the environment is really important to us which is why Tusker continues to offset the tailpipe emissions of all salary sacrifice cars on our fleet against Verified Carbon Standard offsetting projects and we also offset the charging requirements from the grid for our electric vehicles.

We’re continuing to identify opportunities to improve our carbon footprint and effect on the environment and have been really successful in moving our customer car orders from 17 per cent electric in 2019 to 83 per cent electric in 2023. As of December 2023, our salary sacrifice drivers had offset over 337,944 tonnes of carbon!

As a business, we also assess our own operational carbon footprint with a third party each year, and we’re really proud that our office is within an environmentally-conscious business park where we use 100 per cent renewable energy. We also review our carbon management plan annually, which is integrated into our business strategy, to see how we can continually reduce our footprint. We’re delighted that all our efforts have resulted in significant reduction in emissions across all areas of our operations and we’re achieving our annual reduction targets.

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