#Hertz Business with Urs Pfister
nnovation consultant Urs Pfister sees an acute need for action in the charging infrastructure of business locations.
The progressing electrification of passenger cars and commercial vehicles is presenting entirely new challenges for companies in fleet management. In the process, the focus is not only on the vehicles themselves but also on the parking spaces at the company headquarters. If these are prepared too late, companies could be caught on the wrong foot, emphasises innovation consultant Urs Pfister.
Urs Pfister Innovationsconsultant
Whereas it was still a peripheral topic just a few years ago, electro mobility is indisputably on the advance today. So-called plug-in vehicles, i.e. models that can be powered with electricity to drive, accounted for just over a quarter of all new registrations of passenger cars. Of these, more than half were pure electric vehicles, i.e. entirely without a combustion engine. In December alone, the percentage of such new battery-powered cars amounted to 22.9 per cent! Hertz Switzerland also played its part in this record figure; after all, the rental company added 20 new Polestar 2 to its fleet before Christmas. For the time being, these can be hired at three of the 40 Swiss Hertz stations in total. Further stations will follow successively – every one of them first has to be individually equipped with the necessary infrastructure for electro mobility.
Urs Pfister knows only too well that the preparation of business sites for electro mobility cannot be implemented overnight. Known in the automotive and mobility sector as "Mister smart" due to his major part in the development of the car brand smart, Urs Pfister today advises companies and organisations in innovation projects with his company up2move. "More and more customers are contacting me with the desire to update their sites to offer electro mobility. They want to know what is necessary, how long it takes and of course how much it costs."
Urs Pfister never answers these questions in exactly the same way because everything depends on the individual conditions at the site. Starting with the fundamentally available energy that the local electricity plant can deliver to the quality of the electrical cables in the building to the possible potential of producing electricity for the vehicles using the photovoltaic system on the roof at the site. "You have to take all factors into account in order to get the most out of it and to avoid any stumbling blocks," emphasises Urs Pfister, and names as an example of possible complications, among other things, inexperienced charging infrastructure providers. "For many, it is new territory and it is not easy to find the right partners there."
At any rate, Urs Pfister recommends tackling this topic sufficiently early. Because the factor time is sometimes almost the biggest challenge: "With multi-family dwellings, it can take ten or more years until the last inhabitant has an electric car. At companies, however, topics such as CO2 emissions play a substantially more important and more costly role, which is why many will change over in part or in full to electric drive in the next round of procurement. Already because fully electric models in the current chip crisis are available more quickly from many car manufacturers than combustion-engine vehicles that are no longer prioritised." In Urs Pfister's opinion, at the latest on the day on which the battery-powered fleet vehicles are delivered, the right charging infrastructure should be available. A parking space without a charging possibility is then otherwise as useful as an office without access to the Internet.
