When fleet managers first contact us about electrifying their depot or vehicle pool, the conversation almost always starts in the same place: charger counts and hardware specs.
How many chargers do we need? What’s the difference between 7kW and 22kW? Should we consider DC fast charging?
These are reasonable questions, but they’re actually the second conversation. The first and most important conversation is about kilometres.
Specifically: how many kilometres does each vehicle in your fleet travel per day?
That single data point, multiplied across your fleet, is what determines almost every meaningful variable in your charging project: charger count, power output, grid connection requirements, load management needs, and ultimately, whether the project comes in on budget or blows out.
Here’s how fleet managers and facilities teams can use their own kilometre data to approach an EV charging project with clarity.
Why Kilometres Drive Everything
An EV doesn’t care how many chargers are available. It cares about one thing: whether it has enough charge to complete tomorrow’s routes.
This sounds obvious, but it fundamentally changes how you think about charging infrastructure. The goal of a depot charging system isn’t to charge every vehicle as fast as possible, it’s to ensure every vehicle has the energy it needs, ready when it needs it, within the available dwell time.
Dwell time is the window during which a vehicle is parked at the depot and available to charge. For most commercial fleets, that’s overnight, typically eight to twelve hours. For fleets running split shifts or continuous operations, dwell windows may be shorter or more fragmented, which changes the design significantly.
The interaction between daily kilometres, vehicle energy consumption, and dwell time is the core calculation behind any depot charging design. Every other variable, charger power output, circuit capacity, load management parameters, flows from it.
The Basic Calculation (And Why It’s Rarely Basic)
The starting point is straightforward.
A vehicle that travels 150km per day, driving a medium-duty EV with an energy consumption of approximately 0.25 kWh/km, needs about 37.5 kWh of energy replenished before the next shift. A 7kW AC charger running for eight hours delivers 56kWh, more than enough. In this scenario, slower, cheaper chargers work perfectly.
But change one variable and the picture shifts. A vehicle doing 300km per day needs 75kWh replenished. If the dwell window is only six hours, a 7kW charger delivers just 42kWh in that time, not enough. You now need either a higher-output charger (11kW or 22kW), a longer dwell window, or a mid-shift opportunity charge.
This is why kilometre data matters so much. Without it, you’re guessing. And the consequences of guessing wrong are significant, either you overspec the system (higher upfront cost, more grid capacity than needed) or underspec it (vehicles leaving depot undercharged, operational disruptions, pressure to retrofit at far greater expense than getting it right the first time).
The Three Questions Your Kilometre Data Answers
1.What charger output do youactually need?
The most common mistake in fleet EV charging projects is defaulting to high-output chargers because they seem safer. Faster charging feels like more capability. But higher output chargers cost more to purchase, require larger circuits, and place more demand on your grid connection, often unnecessarily.
For most fleets with overnight dwell windows:
These thresholds shift based on vehicle type (different EVs have different consumption rates), payload (heavier loads increase consumption), and route profile (highway driving is more efficient than stop-start urban routes). But kilometre data gives you a starting point that no amount of hardware conversation can substitute for.
2.How many charging points do you need?
This is where fleet managers often request more chargers than necessary, and where kilometre data provides the correction.
If your entire fleet can charge adequately at 7kW overnight, and all vehicles are in depot for eight hours, you may need far fewer simultaneous charging points than you have vehicles. Not every vehicle returns to depot simultaneously. Not every vehicle needs a full charge every night. A 40-vehicle fleet with staggered return times and moderate daily range requirements may be well-served by 20 to 25 charging points, not 40.
Load-managed charging systems, now standard in commercial fleet installations, add further flexibility. By scheduling charging intelligently across the dwell window, load management can handle more vehicles on less total grid capacity than a naive one-charger-per-vehicle approach.
3.What grid connection do youactually need?
Grid connection upgrades are often the single largest cost line in a depot EV charging project, and the one with the longest lead time. Network operators in most Australian jurisdictions require formal applications for significant load increases, and approval and infrastructure delivery timelines can range from three months to over a year.
Kilometre data directly informs grid connection sizing. If your fleet’s total daily energy requirement is 800kWh, and you’re charging across a ten-hour overnight window with load management, your peak grid demand might be 60 to 80kW, not the 280kW you’d calculate by multiplying charger count by maximum output.
Getting this calculation right before you apply to the network operator can save both money and months of delay.
How to Pull Together Your Kilometre Data
Most commercial fleets have this data, the challenge is usually getting it into a usable format.
If you have telematics: Export average daily distance per vehicle across a representative period (at minimum, four to six weeks, ideally three to six months to capture seasonal variation). Break it down by vehicle, not just fleet average, knowing that your average is 180km/day means little if your highest-use vehicles are doing 350km and your lowest-use vehicles are doing 40km.
If you don’t have telematics: Trip sheets, fuel receipts, or odometer logs can work. If you have neither, fuel consumption records combined with your fleet’s average fuel efficiency can give a reasonable estimate of kilometres travelled.
Key numbers to compile:
The maximum daily distance is at least as important as the average. Your charging infrastructure must be able to handle your worst-case day, not just a typical one.
What to Do With This Data Before You Get Quotes
Arriving at a quote conversation with your kilometre data gives you two immediate advantages.
First, it allows a reputable installer to give you a properly sized system rather than a conservative overspec. If your data shows that your heaviest-use vehicle does 220km on your highest-demand day, that’s a design input, not a vague assumption. The difference between a system designed for 220km/day and one designed speculatively for “maybe 300km/day someday” can be tens of thousands of dollars in charger hardware and grid connection costs.
Second, it allows you to have a genuine conversation about staged rollout. If your current fleet is modest but you’re expecting significant growth in the next two to three years, your kilometre data today, combined with your growth projections, gives an installer what they need to design infrastructure with appropriate future capacity built in from the start.
The Conversation We Have at Every Fleet Site Assessment
When our team visits a depot or fleet facility, we ask for kilometre data before we start talking about chargers. Not because we’re stalling, but because it’s the most valuable twenty minutes we can spend before touching the electrical design.
Fleet managers who arrive prepared with their range data, dwell windows, and shift schedules consistently receive faster, more accurate quotes. They also tend to end up with better-designed systems, because the design is built on their actual operations, not on assumptions about what a “typical fleet” looks like.
If you’re planning a fleet EV charging project and want to understand how your kilometre data translates into a charging infrastructure design, our commercial team can walk you through the calculation. Get in touch with EVSE Australia.
EVSE Australia is a leading supplier and installer of commercial and fleet EV charging infrastructure, with licensed electricians and technical consultants across Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane, Adelaide, and Perth.
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