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How Chargetrip is routing one of the UK's largest commercial EV fleets

Newsroom

How Chargetrip is routing one of the UK's largest commercial EV fleets

Newsroom

How Chargetrip is routing one of the UK's largest commercial EV fleets

Openreach installs and maintains the UK's copper and fiber network, and runs one of the biggest fleet electrification projects in the country to do it. Out of 24,000 vehicles, 7,000 are now electric, with more converting every quarter. Behind that rollout sits Chargetrip's routing engine, delivered through Corpay's Allstar platform, deciding when each vehicle charges, where, and at what cost.

Why a fleet this size needed a dedicated routing layer

Switching a fleet to electric changes the operating problem entirely. A diesel van refuels in minutes, anywhere. An EV needs a charge stop planned around real energy consumption, charger availability, and cost, and getting that wrong at scale means idle vehicles and blown budgets.

Chargetrip predicts how much energy any battery electric vehicle will use between two points, then recommends charge stops based on that calculation. Run across a fleet the size of Openreach's, this keeps engineers moving to their next job instead of guessing where to plug in.

How the partnership actually works

Corpay manages fleet expenses for businesses including Openreach through Allstar, its flagship UK product, which serves 50,000 fleets. Drivers get reimbursed for on-road charging and for charging at home through their own utility provider. Chargetrip supplies the routing intelligence underneath all of it.

Chargetrip powers this through Allstar as part of a white label partnership with Corpay. Ahead of the rollout, Chargetrip ran a simulation demonstrating the potential savings available to Openreach's fleet, the same approach recently used to demonstrate value for Sky. The Openreach deployment is the first stage of a much larger rollout, with the same routing intelligence set to become available across all 50,000 Allstar fleets over time.

The cost mechanism behind the routing

Every journey Chargetrip routes generates charging demand data. At the volume Chargetrip operates, that demand becomes leverage. Corpay uses it to negotiate better charging prices on behalf of its fleets, while smarter routing itself reduces on-road charging costs and keeps uptime optimized. For fleet operators, this is usually the real barrier to electrification: not the vehicles, but the cost and reliability of keeping them charged.

Where sustainability fits in

Openreach has set a target of a net zero fleet by 2031. Chargetrip supports that by routing drivers to renewable-only charge point operators where available, which also improves the accuracy of a fleet's carbon reporting against its ESG targets.

What this means for the UK market

Chargetrip currently routes between 25 and 30 percent of all battery electric vehicles in Europe. Openreach represents a move deeper into large-scale commercial fleet electrification, an area accelerating fast as more UK fleets commit to electrifying.

Commercial fleets account for roughly 11 to 12 percent of global emissions, and an estimated 350 million commercial vehicles worldwide still need to be electrified. The vehicles, batteries, and charging infrastructure to make that shift now largely exist. What's been missing is the intelligence layer to coordinate charging across a fleet efficiently, which is the problem Chargetrip was built to solve, and the one it's now solving at scale for the UK's largest network operator.

Running a fleet and wondering what electrification could look like for you? Reach out and we'll run a savings simulation for your fleet.

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