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Ford Pro leaning on charging partnerships to grow fleet EV adoption

Sept. 18, 2024

CFO Navin Kumar said many fleets have been 'more methodical and deliberate' than expected as fleets still focus on EV infrastructure and education.

Geert De Lombaerde

As sales of Ford Motor Co.’s E-Transit electric vans have grown, the automaker’s commercial team has increasingly looked for partnerships focused on charging infrastructure, Ford Pro CFO Navin Kumar said.

Speaking at the Goldman Sachs Communacopia + Technology Conference on Sept. 10, Kumar said local government agencies and the U.S. Postal Service have accounted for two-thirds of the more than 8,000 E-Transit sales Ford has booked so far. (That 8,000 figure is up more than 75% from 2023.) Those customers, Kumar added, have found it easier to build business cases around the smaller geographic footprints they cover—and thus, the easier time they have charging their vehicles—as well as the tax credits they can collect under the Inflation Reduction Act.

But the story so far has been different for larger corporate customers looking to bring a significant number of electric vans and pickup trucks to worksites that can have wildly varying needs.

“We’ve gotten hundreds of hundreds of customers, but the ramp has been more deliberate and methodical than we originally expected,” Kumar said. “A large portion of that is the charging. They want to derisk charging before they scale.”

For Ford Pro, that means ramping up education and training efforts as well as doing more to help customers identify use cases, Kumar said.

“But the big challenge is charging. So we are now having more charging partnerships to address that,” he said. “The bottom line is it is a more methodical and deliberate ramp-up of EVs and commercial fleets than we had initially expected.”

That approach has taken a few different forms so far. Late last year, Ford Pro announced a partnership with multi-state electric utility Xcel Energy Inc. that aims to install 30,000 charging ports across the nation by 2030, with Xcel picking up most upfront costs. The company also this year inked a 10-year deal with Dallas officials to install Ford Pro chargers at city worksites and said it will provide free worksite chargers to Massachusetts charging software customers enrolled in a state energy-savings program.

During his conversation with analyst Mark Delaney, Kumar also shared the following statistics about Ford Pro’s growth in the EV space:

The company now has more than 600,000 paid software subscriptions, with most of those dedicated to vehicle tracking and diagnostics as well as fuel analysis.

Average software subscription revenue per user is running between $7 and $8 per month and growing as more small businesses adopt the platform. That number had started out lower because rental fleets comprised most of the customer base.

Mobile repair orders doubled in the second quarter from the same period in 2023.

Ford Pro now has 32 dedicated Elite Commercial Service centers after launching that program in the spring of last year. The company’s goal is to grow that number to 100 nationally by 2026.

About the Author

Geert De Lombaerde | Senior Editor

A native of Belgium, Geert De Lombaerde has more than two decades of business journalism experience and writes about markets and economic trends for Endeavor Business Media publications FleetOwner, Healthcare Innovation, IndustryWeek, Oil & Gas Journal and T&D World. With a degree in journalism from the University of Missouri, he began his reporting career at the Business Courier in Cincinnati and later was managing editor and editor of the Nashville Business Journal. Most recently, he oversaw the online and print products of the Nashville Post and reported primarily on Middle Tennessee’s finance sector as well as many of its publicly traded companies.