Charged EVs | Electrify your fleet with nothing down with Revolv’s fleet-as-a-service model

Revolv’s fleet-as-a-service model allows companies to pursue electrification without risking any capital.

• For fleet operators, electrification carries not only major costs, but also substantial financial risk—if EVs or infrastructure fail to perform, companies can lose big money. Choosing a fleet-as-a-service model can eliminate that risk, while converting capital expenditure to operating expense.

• Revolv’s focus is on choosing the best hardware, software and services for a customer’s needs, and integrating them into a complete solution. The company works with multiple software providers, vehicle OEMs, EVSE providers and installers, and maintenance service providers.

• Revolv also helps customers navigate the complex process of applying for federal, state, local and utility incentives, relieving fleet operators of the need to develop this specialized expertise in-house.

• California requires that a certain amount of state investment goes to benefit disadvantaged communities. Revolv helps to identify facilities that qualify for greater incentives, delivering greater savings for customers and helping the state achieve its environmental justice goals.

Fleet owners know they need to electrify, but the up-front costs—for vehicles, charging hardware and more—are daunting. And it’s not just a question of finding the capital—investing such large sums in a developing technology that’s outside of a company’s core competency carries substantial risks. More than one fleet has rushed into electrification, laid down lots of cash, and taken a bath.

Some companies spent big to install charging infrastructure, only to be forced to spend more a few years later to rip and replace hardware that turned out not to meet their needs. A couple of well-known car rental agencies bought large numbers of EVs, then struggled to keep them charged up, and ended up selling them at a loss (and a major PR embarrassment) because they didn’t understand the EV resale market.

Fortunately, a growing number of companies—both established players and startups—offer a range of alternatives for fleets that need expert help getting electrified (which is to say, all fleets). Fleet operators can outsource as much or as little of the electrification stack as they choose. If reducing CapEx risk is a priority, the best option may be to choose a company like Revolv, which offers a fleet-as-a-service model, providing EVs, charging infrastructure, project planning, maintenance and more for a flat monthly fee. This not only cuts through the complexity of setting up an electric fleet, it also reduces the risk of unpleasant financial surprises.

Charged spoke with Revolv CEO Scott Davidson.

Charged: It almost sounds too good to be true. How can a fleet operator procure EVs, install charging infrastructure, and set up the software and service contracts to run it all, without risking any capital?

Scott Davidson: Let me start by describing what fleets are faced with today when they’re making those decisions, because they’re faced with a number of challenges that we believe we’re uniquely suited to solve.

The first is that there’s a lot of noise and complexity in the landscape, whether that’s incentives or the types of vehicles that are in the market, or the types of infrastructure. I think what happens a lot of times is providers say, “Hey, I’ve got the solution for you, and it just so happens to be my vehicle or my software solution.”

We see ourselves as operating in the space between all those solutions. We put our arms around everything—we help fleets pick the right vehicles, the right software, the right service provider, and we stitch that together and wrap it into a complete solution that customers buy from a single party. Then we sit on the same side of the table as the customer through operations. We don’t sell the vehicle and walk away. We deliver electric miles on a daily basis that is cost-competitive and performance-competitive with their existing fleet.

What we think the customer wants is economic performance, operational performance, and environmental performance, in that order. Our reason for being is to help fleets stay focused on their business while still achieving those three important things.

Charged: Does a customer usually come to you with an idea of what kind of vehicles they’re looking to buy, or do you consult with them and make recommendations?

Scott Davidson: I would say both. A lot of times, customers have established relationships with OEMs that they buy vehicles from. But if you look at the cargo van space, for example, all the manufacturers that are delivering a cargo van are offering different specifications for payload, range and size.

Our focal point is first to listen to a customer in terms of what they think is important for their day-to-day operations, then to apply the EV lens to it and say, “Given what your operational needs are, and what your preferences are, let’s look at the market and figure out which vehicle is best for you.” We’re technology-agnostic. We’re going to be held to performance for the customer, so we have a natural incentive to pick the right vehicle for them, because if we pick the wrong vehicle, we have to deal with it on an operational basis day to day.

Some of the major OEMs have a broad portfolio of ICE vehicle offerings, of different classes and different sizes, but their EV portfolios are more immature—they usually only serve a specific use case. So, if a fleet has been buying from a specific OEM but their EV product doesn’t fit their operational needs, they have this disconnect between what they need and what the OEM can deliver. Our job is to interpret how they use a vehicle and then find the right EV to serve their needs.

Charged: Once the customer has selected vehicles, then you buy the vehicles or lease them?

Scott Davidson: Correct. We warehouse all the technology risks on behalf of customers. We buy the vehicles, the charging infrastructure, the telematics. We take everything that a fleet would have to invest capital in, and we convert CapEx into OpEx. The first time a fleet pays for a vehicle delivered from Revolv is when it’s in operation and working.

Charged: It sounds like you’re taking on a lot of risk. What if you sign up a customer, you buy 50 trucks, and a couple of years later, they go out of business or say, “I can’t pay,” what happens then?

Scott Davidson: It’s a great question. Yes, we manage that technology risk and business continuity risk for customers, but we do it eyes wide open. There are some manufacturers that we will not buy from because we’re not willing to take that risk. Our job is to look at that risk profile and understand for customers where we’re willing to put our money where our mouth is on specific vehicles.

There are vehicles in our fleet that we are operating today that have different long-term owners—some of them from OEMs that are no longer in business—but those vehicles are still up and running. We have service providers that are maintaining those vehicles to make sure they continue to operate in customer fleets, and that’s the complexity that fleets don’t want to deal with.

Your reference to CapEx is really important. They don’t have CapEx, but there’s a big OpEx component associated with building a team who can do this effectively. There are unique capabilities and skill sets that large fleets like Amazon and FedEx and PepsiCo have at their disposal, but the lion’s share of fleets do not have those resources. That’s where we come in, to add expertise and specialization to help them achieve their objectives without having to build those internal capabilities.

Charged: I often hear companies talking about a stack of products and services. There’s the vehicles, there’s buying the chargers, installing the chargers, maintaining the chargers. How much of that do you do yourself and how much do you work with other companies?

Scott Davidson: Our expertise is in the space between all the solutions. Our job is not to build a vehicle, a software platform, or an on-the-ground service network. Our job is to find the best of all those things and to stitch them together into a complete solution and to make sure the integration of that solution works for customers. That’s typically where EVs struggle—it’s not the quality of the charger or the vehicle, it’s how they connect and the relationship between those and drivers on a day-to-day basis.

When we think about electrification, we think about it as a system, not components. And you really have to focus on the weakest link to make sure that the system is integrating, because one point of failure can bring the entire system down. That’s where we’re laser-focused: the connective tissue between all those solutions.

Charged: So, you work with third-party companies that provide different parts of the value chain?

Scott Davidson: Correct. Multiple software providers, hardware providers on both the vehicle and the charging sides, and service providers in terms of building sites, as well as maintaining them on the back end.

Charged: Can you name any of the software providers you work with?

Scott Davidson: What I can say is that almost every charging management service provider that’s out there, we have integrated into our platform. Some are from the traditional incumbent OEMs, whether it’s Volvo trucks that we have deployed in SoCal or other providers, like the Ford E-Transit cargo vans—all those OEMs typically have some charging management system that we integrate. And then there are also specialty providers in the marketplace. We look at the unique requirements of the fleet and decide what software we plug into our system.

Charged: So it’s a custom-made system for each customer.

Scott Davidson: The integration, yes. If you think about it from a customer’s perspective, they typically already have an existing telematics system. They don’t want to buy another one, and have to go into this portal for ICEs and that portal for EVs. They ask us to provide continuity between how they manage their ICE fleet and their EV fleet.

Charged: Are your customers mostly fleet operators?

Scott Davidson: Yeah. Most of our fleets are based in California because that’s where fleets can achieve economic and operational parity without compromise, but our fleets have a national footprint across the US. The smallest fleet we serve is close to 50 vehicles. The largest has close to 9,000 units.

Most of our fleet customers have tried it on their own and they recognize how hard it is. That’s when they tend to engage us—after they’ve tried it and they say, “Wait, this is way harder than we thought it was going to be.” We’re focused on fleets that recognize that electrification is inevitable and are making investments today to respond to the regulatory pressures, but also with an awareness that EVs are eventually going to be the better economic and operational solution in most applications.

Charged: Is it all truck fleets, or do you do buses and transit too?

Scott Davidson: We are focused on commercial trucks: Class 2, Class 2B (cargo vans), all the way up to Class 8 vehicles. We have the entire spectrum operating in our fleet at the moment. We’ve not yet been focused on government fleets, although we expect to very shortly.

Charged: Which vehicle classes are where the action is right now?

Scott Davidson: Well, I would say there are two dominant themes emerging—or three in California. One, you’re hearing a lot of conversations around drayage, Class 7 and Class 8 vehicles, specifically in ports, because of the regulations, both Advanced Clean Fleets and port regulations. A lot of those are being served by depot providers. They have big power needs in proximity to the ports. You see a lot of companies emerging to provide charging services.

The second segment that we see is large fleet providers who have a compliance obligation as it relates to Advanced Clean Fleets. [Editor’s note: The ACF regulation is partially in effect in 2025. While state and local government fleet requirements remain active, the provisions for Class 7-8 vehicles in high-priority fleets and drayage trucks are not being enforced due to the EPA waiver withdrawal and ongoing legal developments.] A lot of our customers are responding to that to make sure they’re prepared to electrify that class.

The third category is fleets that are adopting because EVs are currently at an economic and operational advantage in their fleet. That’s where we’re uniquely suited to help fleets understand where they can achieve cost parity. That last category, where it makes economic and operational sense, is a growing category in California, but also in other jurisdictions.

Charged: The complex business of sorting through the government incentives is a specialty of yours, especially in California.

Scott Davidson: Yeah. Most of our operations at this point are in California, although we are quickly expanding to serve customers in other markets. What policymakers have done very effectively in California is to establish a carrot and a stick. Advanced Clean Fleets, we think of that as the stick. That’s for the segment of the market that doesn’t want to move.

The carrot is incentives, and those incentives can be in a couple different forms. At the federal level, they can be tax credits. At the state level, they include vehicle purchase incentives, like HVIP in California, and incentives on the utility side of the meter, like the EV Ready [or Charge Ready] programs provided by the investor-owned utilities. There’s also the EnergIIZE program, which we recently were successful in arranging for a number of fleet customers—we secured funding that covers 70% of the total charging infrastructure costs for two California customers in the latest funding round. And there’s the Low Carbon Fuel Standard program, which helps provide credit revenue for electricity that goes to power EVs.

If you look at that incentive landscape—and that’s just a very short summary—you can see the complexity for a fleet. “How do I stitch them all together to reduce my costs to achieve economic parity?” That’s where we help: by stacking all those incentives together so that we can lower their monthly price, and they can achieve their objectives without having to build an internal function for accessing incentives.

Charged: The customer is paying you a monthly fee, but a lot of the incentives are in the form of a block grant or a tax credit. How does that work? Is it you that’s getting the incentive or is the customer getting the incentive?

Scott Davidson: It depends on the incentive. The simplest way to do it is to have the incentive flow through to us and for us to reduce the monthly payment for the customer. And there are well-defined mechanisms for that within the HVIP program in California, which provides a voucher grant for the vehicle. The program looks at us as an effective lessor of the vehicle, and holds us accountable to make sure that the full value of the incentive is passed through to the customer.

We help the regulators navigate these programs, as well as the customers. For the program providers, we’re an expert counterparty—we help them deploy money more efficiently because we know what the program rules are, we know how it works. We reduce friction both for a customer, having to learn the program, and for the program providers for having to teach them how to use it.

Charged: California requires that a certain amount of the state investment goes to benefit disadvantaged communities. Does that factor into your strategy for helping customers get the most out of the incentive programs?

Scott Davidson: Yeah. We look at a fleet’s existing operations and say, “You get more money in disadvantaged communities, so let’s find out where your operations are.” If we can help them prioritize a facility that’s in a disadvantaged community, which receives greater incentives, it’s a win-win for everybody. In the case of the EnergIIZE applications that we submitted, we looked at existing sites for each customer, identified which site was in a disadvantaged community, then built infrastructure at that site. As a result, we were able to access more incentives for those customers.

A fleet might have 20 or 40 different sites in California. Which one has the right revenue profile and can get the most incentives and achieve the best uptime? Which one has the right kind of utility interconnect and the right kind of routes? We sort through that mess for our customers.

You often hear people celebrating or criticizing cases where EVs aren’t working. But that begs the question: Is it the EVs’ fault, or is it how they were applied to the specific use case? It’s our view that it’s going to be important to have ICE vehicles and EVs operating together for some time, and you need to develop expertise to figure out where to allocate which in order to get the best outcome for your fleet.

Charged: Tell us about your background and how you started the company.

Scott Davidson: I started in electrification back in 2019 after spending over a decade helping companies adopt solar energy. What customers cared about was buying clean energy that was cost-competitive, and we did that in the solar sector by providing a similar contract structure to what we’re offering with Revolv.

The solar market has a lot of interesting parallels to today’s EV market. Rising regulations, increasing incentives, declining cost, improving performance—all the factors that were in play with the solar market back in the early 2000s are now in play for the EV space. Revolv was formed in 2020 to help commercial customers reduce cost, complexity and risk.

The market is soon going to be an economics-driven market. At that point, it won’t be about if you care about the environment, it will be about if you care about economic and operational performance. That is going to arrive way faster than people think.

Charged: Are we already at the point of cost parity in certain segments, or is that still a couple of years off?

Scott Davidson: We are absolutely at cost parity. We are already delivering EVs to customers that are below their existing costs of operations. And that market is only going to expand as more products come into the space and costs continue to decline.