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Method 4.2
Measure first. Model second. Buy last.
Every Sprour study runs the same five stages in the same order. The sequence exists because skipping any one of them is how fleets end up with vehicles that cannot finish a shift or chargers the service cannot feed.
01
Baseline
We take three years of fuel card records, maintenance history, insurance schedules and any telematics you already hold, and reconcile them against the asset register. This stage frequently finds vehicles that are on the books but not on the road, and fuel drawn against units that were off-lease.
A cleaned asset and cost baseline in CAD per vehicle per year.
02
Observe
We fit CAN-bus loggers to a statistically representative sample — typically 20 to 35% of the fleet — and record at one-second resolution for sixty consecutive days. The window is placed to capture your hardest season, which in most of Canada means January through March. Loggers are removed at the end; nothing stays installed.
Per-vehicle duty cycles: distance, dwell, idle, payload proxy, grade and ambient temperature.
03
Model
Two models run in parallel. The energy model converts each observed duty cycle into a battery demand at real winter consumption. The depot model tests whether your existing service, panel and dwell windows can deliver that energy without a demand charge penalty or a service upgrade. Only then do we run the ten-year cost comparison.
Readiness rating per vehicle, depot load curve, and a ten-year TCO with sensitivity ranges.
04
Pilot
A small number of units and one commissioned charger run through a full season while we monitor against the forecast. If measured consumption lands outside the modelled band — which happens on roughly one study in five, usually because of auxiliary equipment nobody mentioned — we return to stage three before anything else is ordered.
A variance report: forecast against measured, with the model corrected.
05
Stage
Replacement is sequenced across five years against your existing capital cycle, utility lead times and incentive windows. We write the tender language, sit on the evaluation panel if you want us there, and re-forecast quarterly as electricity tariffs, incentive programmes and residual values move.
A dated replacement schedule, procurement documents and quarterly re-forecasts.
Stage 03 in detail
The depot decides the schedule, not the vehicle
The single most common finding in our files is that a fleet can afford the vehicles and cannot yet feed them. When every unit plugs in at shift end, demand stacks into a short, expensive spike. Spread the same energy across the overnight dwell window and the peak often falls below the existing service limit entirely.
The chart shows a 26-truck distribution depot we studied in 2025. Unmanaged plug-in would have required a service upgrade quoted at CAD $610,000 with a 22-month utility lead time. Scheduled charging across the 18:00 to 05:00 window held the peak at 186 kW and removed the upgrade from the plan.
Charging control is usually a software and policy decision costing thousands. Service upgrades are a civil works decision costing hundreds of thousands. We test the cheap answer first, every time.
House rules
Four commitments we do not negotiate
We take no vendor money
No referral fees, no reseller margin, no charger or software partnerships. Our entire revenue is client fees, which is the only way a recommendation to buy nothing stays possible.
You own the raw data
Logged telemetry, models and spreadsheets are handed over in open formats at the end of the engagement. Nothing is locked in a portal you have to keep paying for.
We will tell you to wait
Roughly one study in six ends with a recommendation not to electrify yet. That finding is delivered in full, with the conditions that would change it and a date to re-test.
Numbers carry their uncertainty
Every figure we publish comes with its sample size and its range. A ten-year forecast presented as a single confident number is a sales document, not an analysis.