Community health and care organisation to expand electric fleet

Essex-based health and care organisation Provide is installing charge points at five of its sites as part of its EV rollout.

The organisation is planning to expand its fleet of Nissan Leaf EVs.

Provide has also adopted its artificial intelligence-based journey prediction through Spark EV.

Spark’s technology allows vehicles to complete more journeys between charges, removes range anxiety and enables greater fleet utilisation, with up to 20 per cent more journeys completed between charges.

Spark works by collecting live driver, vehicle and other data sources, such as the weather and congestion, via an in-car sensor and then using its cloud-based machine learning algorithms to provide more accurate journey predictions for electric vehicles.

Fleet managers and drivers simply enter their proposed journey into Spark’s smartphone app and get advice on whether they will be able to complete it - based on live data, previous trips and charge point locations.

This delivers reassurance to fleet managers and drivers that they will be able to schedule and complete jobs without running out of charge, removing range anxiety while increasing the amount of potential vehicle journeys by an additional 2.8 per day.

Philip Richards, executive finance director and company secretary at Provide, said: “We understand the benefits of EVs in terms of increasing efficiency and demonstrating our green credentials to the communities we serve.

“At the same time, our patients rely on us being in the right place at the right time, meaning it is vital that our EV fleet is used efficiently, without staff needing to worry about not being able to complete their schedules due to running out of charge. By quickly providing us with more accurate journey predictions Spark EV removes range anxiety and is therefore accelerating our EV adoption.”