This year’s ACT Expo brought together more than 100 public fleets and zero-emission vehicle equipment suppliers to discuss the opportunities and challenges to meeting California’s Advanced Clean Fleet regulation for government fleets. The event was brought together from support by NAFA, MEMA, and TRC — the producers of ACT Expo — to broker a dialogue and increase partnership among these two important groups.
The event was closed-door, invite-only and limited to just these two stakeholder groups to enable candor and discussion to occur — and it worked. Public fleets shared their needs and concerns, and suppliers were able to share their challenges in helping to address these needs.
When we began planning this session, we knew that most of the suppliers in the room struggle with supporting public fleets — many have quite simply never done it and they’re more used to serving a private commercial fleet market instead. For this reason, the session started off with a short panel discussion that really helped set the stage for all of the suppliers in the room. We brought together a panel just to help lay out:
- What is a government fleet?
- What are the different types of agencies and how many exist in California?
- What is an example of the composition of a government fleet? (An overarching sentiment was shared that, “If you’ve seen one public fleet, you’ve seen one public fleet.”)
- What are some of the unique concerns and challenges from public fleets?
- How does procurement work and what are things suppliers should know?
After the short panel, we opened up the floor to some Q&A from suppliers. Many of them were simply not aware of the myriad of options that exist for procurement — especially “piggyback” agreements (or agreements executed by one public agency that another public agency can procure from) — and how to find them. This is definitely an area that needs even more discussion and thought in order to enable more widespread electrification among public fleets.
The group then went into a round-robin-style discussion where we asked fleets in the room, sector by sector, to describe their needs and some of the challenges they are facing.
Some key takeaways from this discussion are as follows:
- Procurement options: Most suppliers are not aware of the different bidding sites that exist and how to effectively position themselves for responses. Many fleets are also defaulting to an easier format for procurement to avoid an RFP, when an RFP might actually be the most effective path to meet their needs. One fleet manager even expressed the need to rethink procurement options through a “design-build approach to fleet procurement.”
- Outdated specs: It was clearly communicated by the fleets that the specs of the equipment are severely outdated, and fleet managers simply do not have the time to go through the process of updating these specs in time for when the vehicles need to be replaced to meet compliance requirements. To add to this, fleet managers normally have to develop the specs but are not necessarily the operational experts, creating a significant gap in the process. A single spec can take more than 200 hours of staff time, and we’re talking about needing to update hundreds of these. You also don’t want to make specs so specific that you get pigeon-holed on responses, but this is juxtaposed against the challenge that most fleet managers do not have expertise in electrification.
- Competitive responses: Fleets expressed frustration that suppliers tend to provide too high of level information (e.g., range of the vehicle as a whole) when they really need duty-cycle specific information. True vocational capacity is needed, as well as a clear sense of detail on the ruggedness of the vehicle for real durability testing. Also, it was clearly expressed that brand loyalty does not exist yet, but their local dealer having a network is critical for support, because things will absolutely break at some point.
- Infrastructure: There was a consensus that we need to discuss infrastructure at some point, but we are so far away from that, since it’s still unclear what vehicles are going to be available.
- Testing: A clear call to action from the suppliers (and to the government funding partners) is that a rental program needs to exist for government fleets to try these out for longer durations to determine the right fit in each environment.
- Sales Tactics: A word of caution was also offered to the suppliers: Fleets talk to each other, so trying to game the system with pricing and price gouging, to then negotiate later, is not a good strategy. Not only do fleets talk, but the fleet managers running these procurements simply don’t have time for these tactics. Also, do not set your sales teams loose — public fleets buy what they are going to buy when they’re ready.
Ultimately, this was a much-needed start to a conversation with equipment suppliers and public fleets to enable ACF compliance. But more discussion and dialogue is needed, as well as resources to public fleets to help them streamline the work that is needed to enable electrification. NAFA, MEMA and TRC look forward to bringing these groups together many times over the next year to continue bridging some of these critical gaps to provide public fleets what they need to address their needs.
