How Siemens electrified 50 percent of its U.S. fleet
Here is what the journey to halfway actually took. We didn’t start with trucks. We started with Teslas in December 2020 and expanded with Volvos and Ford Mustangs in 2021. In February 2023, when I was a few months into the role, I ran a field study at some of our largest service locations, showing up with scales and opening the backs of vans to see what technicians really carried. The finding was blunt.
I said, “Guys, we’re hauling a lot of air,” because more and more of our parts were being shipped to our customers and our people were doing the install, so mostly what they had in their vehicles were tools and a ladder.
Multiply that with four hundred vehicles and you’re just wasting gas driving around an entire empty warehouse every day.
So, my fleet team and I changed the vehicle to fit the work. We moved service crews into the Chevrolet Equinox, first in gas versions to prove the concept, then quickly into the Equinox EV, now our most common vehicle. Technicians who had used large vans went into the Silverado EV, rated above 400 miles of range. The custom upfit, a folding-ladder system and a single open bay with a tub for gear, came straight from driver feedback and customer necessity.
None of that existed off the shelf. No one was building SUV upfits or Silverado EV bed toppers at the volume we needed, so we pushed outfitters like Adrian and LTA to design them. The market followed. Siemens is now one of General Motor’s largest EV commercial customers worldwide. We have reached 2,232 EVs across our Equinox and Silverado fleets today, each capable of sending power back to a building or the grid.
The full process went like this:
Leadership in Siemens Smart Infrastructure made the pace of that process possible. When employees asked for an exception — and some did — the answer was that exception requests went to the top of the house, and that usually ended the conversation. Siemens leadership said, “Electrification is what we’re doing,” and this has been made clear top-down. Across the company, leadership has been a clear driver of our sustainability progress. Their commitment gives us the confidence to reduce absolute emissions from our own operations by 90 percent by Fiscal 2030 while addressing residual emissions, and to achieve Net-Zero across our entire value chain by fiscal 2050. When the people in the C-suites lead the way, it gets communicated across the company and other businesses in the industry.
Why fleet electrification makes strategic sense in 2026
What we lived through in electrifying the Siemens fleet is now available to other fleets. The commercial models exist. The charging networks have expanded. The economics hold without relying on incentives, which matters because federal EV tax credits have changed even as many state and utility programs remain. A fleet building its business case now can still capture real savings.
The one piece of the puzzle most operators underestimate is time. Utility upgrades to power a depot can run three to five years, which makes charging a planning problem before it becomes a purchase. John Heaton of WSP puts it plainly: engage the utility early, size for phased growth, and treat electrification as a long game. The companies that start site selection and utility coordination now are the ones with cost certainty later, before a single vehicle is ordered.
There is a second reason 2026 matters, and it is the part the headlines miss. A fleet of connected EVs is a stream of live data and a distributed store of energy. Combining the real and digital worlds, those vehicles can model how a fleet behaves in heat, cold, or elevation, and can feed power back into a building during an outage. Siemens runs its own fleet as exactly that kind of system. The vehicle stopped being just a vehicle a while ago.
Fleet-electrification best practices: Lessons for corporate fleet managers
The lessons that travel best are unglamorous. These are the ones that will always stay with me as a fleet manager:
- Leadership gets onboard early and clears the path. This was an essential differentiator for the Siemens fleet.
- Start with a focus on the work and the correct duty cycles, not necessarily the vehicle. Look at the driving routes, the tools your service people need, and where your people are going.
- Plan the necessary charging infrastructure before vehicles The utility coordination, depot charging, and site selection come first, not after the EVs arrive.
- Use data to challenge all the assumptions about deploying EVs. The real story of how your current fleet operates is in the data, not in myths that can’t be measured.
- Engage your industry peers. Organizations like EV100 and the Corporate Electric Vehicle Alliance shorten the learning curve through shared data—seek them out.
We’ve done the work, and we’re still doing it. The next 2,000 vehicles are already teaching the team things the first 2,000 did not. If your organization is weighing the same move, the economics and the infrastructure are more ready than the headlines suggest.
We’ll have more to share at Climate Week, including where the next phase takes us. To peers in EV100 and beyond, be vocal about your progress and what you’ve learned because data is better when we compare notes. Join the conversation, share your fleet electrification progress, and help accelerate the transition by learning from organizations already making the shift.
Published: August 18, 2026
