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Completed studies

What we found, including when the answer was no

A summary of every completed engagement is published here within ninety days of delivery. Client identities are withheld and fleet details are lightly generalised, but no figure is adjusted to make the outcome look better than it was.

FR-2025-07 · Public worksProceed

Municipal yard, 84 units, Prince Edward Island

A mixed yard of half-ton pickups, cube vans and single-axle plough trucks sharing one 600 V service. Sixty days of logging through February showed the pickups accumulating more idle hours than driving hours — crews were running engines for cab heat between calls, at a fuel cost nobody had isolated before.

The plough fleet stayed diesel: winter duty cycles and the auxiliary hydraulic load put them outside a defensible envelope. Forty-one light-duty units entered a three-year replacement schedule, and scheduled overnight charging kept the depot inside its existing service.

  • Phase-one units41 of 84
  • Service upgradeNot required
  • Idle fuel identifiedCAD $61,400/yr
  • Modelled 10-yr savingCAD $1.94M
FR-2025-02 · Food distributionProceed, staged

Regional distributor, 26 medium-duty trucks, New Brunswick

Routes were well inside range and the vehicle case was strong from the first week of data. The constraint was entirely electrical. Unmanaged plug-in at 17:30 produced a modelled 470 kW spike against a 400 kW service, triggering an upgrade quoted at CAD $610,000 with a 22-month lead time.

Shifting to a scheduled overnight window flattened the peak to 186 kW. The upgrade came out of the plan entirely, and the saved capital funded six additional vehicles in phase one.

  • Peak, unmanaged470 kW
  • Peak, scheduled186 kW
  • Upgrade avoidedCAD $610,000
  • Phase-one vehicles18 of 26
FR-2024-11 · Community healthWait one cycle

Provincial care service, 180 sedans, Nova Scotia

Staff take vehicles home across 43 communities, so there is no depot in the sense our depot model assumes. Sixty-seven staff had no viable place to charge: apartment parking without outlets, shared driveways, or rural properties with service limits of their own.

Proceeding would have meant either a residential charging programme the organisation had no mandate to run, or an unequal fleet in which where you live decides which vehicle you drive. We recommended plug-in hybrids on the current replacement cycle and a full re-assessment once the province’s multi-unit charging programme reaches the relevant regions.

  • RecommendationHybrid-first
  • Home charging gap67 of 180
  • Modelled EV penaltyCAD $340,000
  • Re-assessmentQ1 2027
FR-2024-05 · Trades contractorProceed

Mechanical contractor, 52 service vans, Ontario

Service vans returning to one yard every night, average logged distance 118 km, longest observed day 262 km. The technical case was straightforward. The difficulty was commercial: the fleet was on a four-year lease cycle that did not align with vehicle availability windows.

We rebuilt the schedule around lease expiry rather than calendar years, added a bridging clause to the next lease tender, and specified charger capacity for the fleet at year five rather than year one so the electrical work happened once.

  • Median daily distance118 km
  • Units electrifiable47 of 52
  • Chargers installed12 dual-port
  • Payback, base case6.1 years
On anonymity

Clients approve every field report before publication and may request that a study not appear at all. Distances, fleet counts and dollar figures are reported as measured. Where a detail would identify the organisation — a specific route, a named facility, a unique vehicle type — it is generalised to the nearest honest description rather than altered.