The cheap money that built the charging industry has gone quiet. What comes next rewards a different kind of operator, and it puts fleets at the centre of the story.

The race to deploy left profitability behind

For about three years, building a charging network was mostly a question of speed. Capital was cheap, eager to fund deployment, and the brief from investors rarely changed. Put chargers in the ground, hit the number, and trust that demand will catch up. On paper, the money is still flowing. The appetite behind it has thinned, and the reason matters for anyone planning to rise in the next two years.

The force running the industry now is profitability. Many operators are not making money on the networks they have already built, and everyone can feel the shift. You can see it in who is buying whom. Networks are changing hands across the UK, and the language in every announcement is the same. More scale, a lower cost per site. That is a polite way of describing a route to profit that they could not reach on their own. These are not land grabs. They are the sound of capital running out of patience.

Demand is finally increasing, but not as a rescue

It is worth being clear about how we got here. There was a period of heavy investment built on the assumption that demand would come sooner or later, or at least sooner than it did. Then the last two years emptied the tank. Incentives dried up. The new administration in the United States turned policy back toward oil and rewrote the programmes that had underwritten build-outs. Europe felt the chill, too.

And then this spring, demand started to increase. Battery electric cars took around 27% of the UK new car market in May, up more than 30% on the year before, and March set a record. More than two million fully electric cars now drive the UK roads. The reasons are worth reading closely. Part of it is cheaper, more practical models, with mainstream brands leading rather than premium badges. The rest is fuel prices. Conflict in the Middle East has pushed petrol and diesel up, and a driver already weighing an electric next car now has one more reason to switch. That is a different buyer from the early adopter, and there are far more of them.

This is where operators get caught out. A surge in demand lifts the good sites and exposes the bad ones. It does nothing for a charger in the wrong place, and it does not repair a cost base that never made sense. More cars plugging in will not save a network someone built solely to hit a deployment target and overpaid for the site.

Why a charging network makes poor collateral

Which brings me to the money. Specifically, loan vs equity financing. A loan needs collateral, and a charging network makes poor collateral. Think about where the spend goes when you build a site. Only one part buys the hardware. The rest disappears into trenching, the grid connection, the civil works, the months of groundwork nobody ever sees. If the business fails, a lender can take the chargers. They cannot dig the cable back out of the ground, re-expose the concrete, or recoup the cost of the grid upgrade. That value stays with the landowner. Add a track record that gives a lender little basis for modelling when the loan gets repaid, and the debt comes off the table. That leaves equity, and today's equity investors ask a sharper question. Not how fast can you build, but when does the network start making money?

During the boom, almost nobody had to answer that. The deal was blunt. Here is the cash, put 300 chargers live by year-end. Quantity over quality. I sat in plenty of conversations where the whole target was a deployment number, and the honest reply, yes, but not at any price, rarely won the room. Operators bought sites in 2023 and 2024 at prices that only worked on demand that had yet to arrive. In hindsight, that was a bad trade. The operators who held their discipline and missed the deployment numbers back then look like the sensible ones now.

The industry has run this cycle before

We have watched this film before. When the railways and telecoms networks were first built, many early operators overspent, got overleveraged, and were later forced to sell their assets for pennies on the dollar. The businesses that did well were often the ones that bought those assets cheaply, out of the wreckage, and ran them with discipline. Charging is tracking the same path. Expect more networks to come to market this year, and the numbers are getting harder to hide.

So the operators who attract money now are the ones who already run as though money is scarce. The pattern repeats every time I look at a healthy network. They run more sites per person. They have not built a department for every problem, and they can tell you the economics of every site they operate. That discipline shows up twice. In how well they run what they have, and in how carefully they choose where the next charger goes. Those operators are still growing. They are still raising. That is not luck.

Fleets are the second engine, and most operators miss it

There is a second engine here, and it is the one most operators underplay. Fleets.

Electric vehicles are getting bigger and cheaper. Vans, heavier commercial vehicles, the workhorses cities run on, all of it is now within reach for buyers who order in volume. A large number of fleets are working through electrification right now. Three forces push them: net-zero commitments they set for themselves, city rules that make older diesels steadily more expensive to run, and major clients mandating net-zero from certain dates onwards.

Electrifying a fleet only works when three groups start working together, and most of them are used to ignoring each other. Vehicle makers and dealers are the first. Selling the van is no longer the whole job, because the fleet manager's next question is how to charge it. The maker or dealer who can answer that, or partner with someone who can, takes a share from those who hand over the keys and walk off. There is a real opening for dealers here right now. Fleet operators are the second. A fleet cannot simply order new vehicles and hope. They need a partner to help them work out which vehicles to switch, in what order, and how they will charge, grounded in how the fleet runs in practice rather than in a brochure. Charging providers are the third. The group spans public network operators and firms that build and run private depots. For an operator, a fleet is a heavy, predictable user. A deal with one guarantees energy offtake and lifts utilisation on sites that would otherwise sit idle between peaks.

Same vehicle count, completely different infrastructure

There is a catch, and it is the whole game. You cannot serve a fleet with a generic product. Say a depot has 24 vehicles to charge. If they trickle back one at a time through the evening and they need to be full by morning, you build one kind of site. If they all return at noon for a fast recharge and have to be ready again in 1 hour, you build something else entirely, with far more power and a much tighter energy plan. Same vehicle count, completely different infrastructure and economics. Read it wrong, and the fleet ends up unhappy as they have built the wrong thing.

The strategic point follows from that. Fleet vehicles cover far more miles than the average private car, so they pull a share of charging energy well above their share of vehicles on the road. An operator with no fleet-ready offer has quietly written off that demand. It is a decision, even when nobody set out to make it.

The work that Dodona was built to do

Connecting those three sides is the work done at Dodona, and we ground every decision in real demand rather than guesswork. For fleets, our Which, Where, When framework takes the questions in the order they arrive: which vehicles to transition first, where they will charge, and when to move.

The deploy-fast decade is over. The next one rewards whoever runs the tightest network and reads demand most clearly. The operators who also treat fleets as real customers, not an afterthought, will pull ahead. The money has already worked this out. The ones who make it through will be the operators who do the same before their next raise, not after.

One question is worth sitting with before that raise. Can you point at your network and say which sites make money and which lose it? And do you know where the next charger has to go to earn its place? That is the work we do at Dodona. If it is the question in front of you, let's talk.

Most fleet operators know electrification is coming. The harder problem is figuring out where to start and how to structure something that still makes sense three years from now, when the market looks different.

That tension comes down to three questions. Which vehicles can make the switch? Where will they charge? When to move and in what order? These questions look simple in isolation. In practice, they are intertwined in ways that make it almost impossible to answer one without the other.

The answer to which vehicles to electrify first depends on where your charging infrastructure will be located. Your infrastructure decisions depend on how your vehicles move. Your phasing depends on both. Get one wrong, and your vehicles will not operate.

Which vehicles can transition

Not every vehicle in your fleet is ready at the same time, and trying to transition them all at once is a reliable way to run into trouble.

The vehicles that switch cleanly are those running shorter, more predictable routes. Vehicles that return to a depot or home location overnight. Drivers who dwell somewhere long enough to top up. Routes where daily mileage sits comfortably within the range of available EVs.

Identifying those vehicles requires actual data. Telematics records that show how far each vehicle travels, where it stops, and for how long. Upload that data, and you can see, vehicle by vehicle, which ones would have had range issues over the last year if they had been running on electric. The ones with no issues are your starting point.

The ones that do not make the cut yet are not failures. They just need a different approach and likely a different timeline. Some will become viable as public networks grow around the routes they use, or as you build your own charging infrastructure. Others will get easier as EV ranges keep improving: the average in 2020 sat at around 330 to 420 kilometres; by 2025, it had moved to 380 to 500 kilometres. What looks difficult today often looks straightforward two years later.

This is not about being conservative. It is about having confidence that you will have an operational electric fleet.

Where will they charge

An electric vehicle can only operate if it can charge. This is where most electrification plans run into their first real problem.

For any fleet, multiple charging options operate in parallel: at home, at depots or offices, at client and partner locations, and on public or dedicated networks. Each plays a different role, and the right mix depends entirely on how your fleet operates.

Home charging is the simplest lever for the right vehicles. A driver plugs in overnight and leaves with a full battery every morning. For vehicles with moderate daily mileage and drivers who have a home charging station, that is often all you need. The infrastructure cost is relatively low, and the logistics are straightforward. But not all drivers have driveways and the option to charge at home.

Depot charging handles vehicles that need more. A warehouse, a logistics hub, an office car park: if vehicles dwell there for a meaningful window, chargers there make use of time that would otherwise be wasted. But depots can be constrained by power availability, so you may not have enough capacity to charge all vehicles at once.

Public networks can sometimes fill the gaps. A vehicle that runs long distances needs a reliable on-route recharging option. The question is which public networks actually cover the routes your fleet uses, and whether partnering with one over another gives your vehicles better access or better commercial terms.

There are also questions worth thinking through before you commit to anything. Do you need to build your own charging infrastructure beyond your locations? Can you charge at your clients or partners locations? What does it mean for your business if a vehicle cannot be recharged at the time planned?

The answer is almost always a mix. If you want to go deeper on how different charging scenarios stack up against each other, the tradeoffs between depot, home, public, shared, and semi-public charging are covered in detail in the Which charging scenario suits my fleet article we posted previously.

When to make the switch

Timing matters. Starting with the wrong vehicles undermines confidence in the programme as a whole. Starting without considering the charging infrastructure creates the same problem from a different angle.

Fleet electrification is not a two-week Excel exercise. For most fleets, replacing the entire fleet takes seven to ten years. Vehicles have amortisation cycles of seven or eight years, which means each year roughly a seventh of the fleet becomes a candidate for replacement. You are not making one big decision. You are making a sequence of smaller ones across a longer time horizon.

Phase one should be tight and well-studied. You know which vehicles you are electrifying, which charging infrastructure you are installing, the costs, and the rollout. Start with what is genuinely ready and do it properly.

Phase two is typically more directional. You have a solid working plan, but you hold it loosely, because by the time you execute it, the market will have moved. EV ranges have been shifting steadily. Charger costs have come down. Public networks have grown. The cases that were not ready in phase one will look different by then.

Phase three and beyond should leave room to adapt. A plan that cannot flex to a rapidly changing market is not a plan. It is a liability.

The goal is not a detailed ten-year fixed roadmap. It is a structured phased plan with enough flexibility in the outer years to respond to a market that will undoubtedly look different by the time you get there.

Why do most tools only answer one of the three

There are tools that help you optimise routes for individual vehicles. There are tools that help you decide where to put chargers at a single site. What has been missing is something that looks at which, where, and when together and maps them onto how your fleet actually operates.

Fleet management software was built around different problems. It understands scheduling, driver management, and maintenance cycles. It was not built for the new layer of complexity that electrification adds: understanding which vehicles are ready, mapping them against actual charging coverage, and sequencing the entire electrification project across multiple sites and years.

Dodona comes from a long-standing heritage. The platform was built to help charging point operators understand where and how to deploy EV charging infrastructure. That same analytical foundation, built on real charging data, real network coverage, and real vehicle behaviour, is what fleet operators need when they are working out what an electrification project actually looks like for their own operation.

The CPO fit analysis overlays your fleet's actual stop locations and estimated battery states onto the public charging infrastructure in your area. You can see exactly how well different networks cover your routes and where depot or home charging needs to fill the gaps. That connection between vehicle behaviour and charging reality is what turns a transition plan into something you can actually execute.

What this looks like in practice

A fleet of 180 vehicles. You upload the telematics data, the records of where each vehicle went and when. The platform analyses it and shows you, for each vehicle, how that driving pattern would have worked with a specific EV model. Most of them are green. A handful have days where they would have needed a top-up somewhere. One or two have routes that are genuinely difficult.

You can immediately see which vehicles to electrify first. You can see which public charging operators have sites along the routes your difficult vehicles take. You can add a depot location and watch the analysis update. Fewer range concerns. A clearer picture of what infrastructure you actually need.

Then you structure it into phases. Phase one: the easy vehicles, depot chargers at your main site, and home charging for drivers who can use it. Phase two: the next tier, expanded public network coverage, potentially a second site. And so on.

That is the conversation Dodona makes possible. Which vehicles. Where they charge. When to move. Answered together rather than one at a time in a vacuum.

Book a 30-minute demo and bring your questions. No commitment required:

Read more about fleet electrification on the Dodona blog.

Explore our new fleet lading page and read the case study.

Dodona helps fleet operators make better EV charging decisions. Clients include E.ON Drive, Mercedes-Benz, Bosch, and TotalEnergies.