Imposing electric in fleets is an own goal
Fleets risk becoming the scapegoat between accelerated transition, technological limitations and penalising taxation
Hallelujah! Hallelujah! Corporate fleets have a new patron saint. It is an environmental organisation that, while the automotive and business worlds anxiously await the EU's redefinition of the ban on the sale of CO2-emitting cars after 2035, is proposing to bring forward the ban on the sale to large fleets of cars other than electric cars to 2030 because, as well as the environment, this solution, claims the well-deserving association, would bring great advantages to European car manufacturers, today exhausted precisely by the EU's policy for the energy transition of the car, also carried out to the tune of multi-billion dollar fines. In particular, the promoters of bringing forward the ban on non-electric cars for large fleets claim that this solution could guarantee European manufacturers (but also non-European ones, we would add) a demand for more than two million electric vehicles.
However, the authors of the proposal do not explain how the idea could be taken up by large fleets. As we all know, with a few commendable exceptions, there are very few electric cars in large and small company fleets today, and the reasons are well known. Company cars are given as benefits to special employees who use them for work, but also for personal use, or they are used exclusively for work. In both cases, but particularly in the latter, the main criterion guiding the choice of cars to be added to the fleet can only be efficiency, ease of use, autonomy, ease of refuelling and refuelling times, aspects for which the comparison with internal combustion cars is decidedly losing out for the electric car. On the other hand, the world of car fleets, in addition to the problems that would arise with the adoption of the proposal we have discussed, already has many other problems to solve. In particular, the Italian one has to reckon with a particularly voracious tax system, which limits the deductibility of car costs and excludes the deductibility of VAT, placing Italian companies that have to use fleets in an inferior position compared to their competitors in other EU countries. Italian fleets therefore do not deserve to be persecuted even by ecologists.
