The fuel card analogy: why EV charging can (finally) work like filling up
Every fleet manager knows how a fuel card works. One card for every driver and every (or most) stations. One invoice at the end of the month.
Then fleets go electric and that simplicity seems to disappear. A home charger here, a workplace charger there, a motorway rapid charger somewhere else; each with its own tariff, its own login and its own route to getting paid for.
It doesn't have to stay that way. Asked how close the industry is to matching the simplicity of fuel, Rightcharge Founder and CEO Charlie Cook said: "Very close."
Filling up worked because drivers had one fuel card and the business got one bill, he explained. Charging can work the same way, with a driver using one charge card on the road and at home, on the same account, and the fleet getting everything on one bill. The piece still missing, he added, is seeing the price before you plug in, the way you'd see it on a fuel station billboard.
That's the goal. Here's what gets in the way of it and how it gets solved.
Reimbursing drivers accurately
Home charging is usually the cheapest way to run an EV fleet, but only if fleet managers can see it. Left to manual processes, reimbursement means chasing energy bills and doing the sums by hand, for every driver, every month. It's slow and it's the reason a lot of fleets under-use the cheapest charging available to them.
The fix is to stop doing it by hand. Connect the charger, the driver's home energy tariff and the vehicle and the cost of a session gets calculated automatically; drivers get paid the right amount without anyone working it out manually.
Charger compatibility
Fleets rarely run one vehicle model, which means charger and driver setups all vary. Getting a system that reliably reads different chargers and vehicles and confirms which vehicle did the charging, has been one of the trickiest parts of running home charging across a mixed fleet.
The fix is verification that happens automatically in the background, matching vehicle to charger to session, so a fleet manager never has to confirm it by hand.
Visibility
This is the biggie. Public charging invoices arrive neatly, one line per network, easy to review. Home charging sits inside individual drivers' home energy bills, invisible to the fleet unless someone goes looking for it.
That's the wrong way round, because home charging is usually where the savings are hiding. The fix is a single platform across both home and public charging, with one bill and full visibility over where every driver charged and what they paid.
Put those fixes together and you get what Charlie described. You’ll have a driver with one charge card that works everywhere and a fleet with one bill that shows everything.
Where the Gold Card fits in
One card and one bill covers reimbursement and visibility. The other part of the puzzle is making sure the public charging that does happen isn't priced against you. That's what the Rightcharge Gold Card is for.
Drivers keep their Standard Card for everyday coverage, and add the Gold Card for reduced rates at partner networks: 49p/kWh for AC and 59p/kWh for DC, across four of the UK's major charging networks.
The Gold Card was piloted with the AA and is now moving through a wider beta. Three things stand out from testing so far.
- The savings are real when the right behaviour happens. Drivers who use the Gold Card at the right networks see a genuine drop in their public charging cost.
- Drivers won't do that on their own. Left unprompted, most drivers charge wherever is closest, not wherever is cheapest. Getting the savings means educating drivers on what's in it for them, which is now being built into the product rather than left to chance.
- Data gives fleet managers more say over driver behaviour. The more visibility a fleet manager has, the more they can influence how drivers charge. That's why the beta includes full session dashboards with driver-level views, showing exactly where savings were made and where they were missed.
Treat charging like fuel
Charlie's advice to fleets switching to electric sums up the approach is this: treat charging like fuel. No fleet would run a fuel card with no visibility over where drivers filled up or what they paid per litre; charging deserves the same standard.
The fleets winning with EVs know where every kWh goes and what it costs, at home and on the road.