Demonstrating the growth of electric vehicles (EVs) within business fleets, Spark EV has announced that Essex-based health and care organisation, Provide, has adopted its artificial intelligence-based journey prediction solution.
A staff-owned community interest company, Provide delivers health and care services, such as community nursing, physiotherapy and podiatry, to patients across Essex, outer London and East Anglia, covering a population of 1.9 million people.
Many of its members of staff are mobile, visiting patients in their own homes, community clinics and community hospitals.
The organisation is rolling out EVs across its fleet, with Spark’s simple-to-install technology enabling vehicles to complete more journeys between charges, removing range anxiety, and enabling greater fleet utilisation, with up to 20% 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.
“We understand the benefits of EVs in terms of increasing efficiency and demonstrating our green credentials to the communities we serve,” said Philip Richards, executive finance director and company secretary at Provide.
“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.”
As part of its EV rollout, Provide is also installing charge points at five of its sites and is planning to expand its fleet of Nissan Leaf EVs.
“Provide’s adoption of Spark EV demonstrates how our technology can support the move to widescale electric vehicle adoption,” said Justin Ott, chief executive of Spark EV Technology.
“Provide is now able to ensure that its mobile workers can operate efficiently and effectively, overcoming range anxiety, while delivering vital services to patients within the community. It is a perfect use case of how we can help EV adoption within any fleet.”
Delivered through a monthly subscription model, Spark easily integrates with existing fleet management/scheduling systems through its open API, or can be used as a stand-alone solution for smaller fleets and can be installed with all current EVs.