As Sr. Manager of Sustainable Mobility at Geotab, the global leader in connected transportation, Charlotte’s focus is on enabling fleets in reducing carbon emissions with data-driven solutions, and sharing aggregated insights to inform large-scale decarbonization strategies. She is a subject matter expert in fleet electrification and a champion for connected vehicle technology solutions in the EV industry. Charlotte has been involved in sustainable transportation programs since 2009. Before joining Geotab she managed the Green Fleet and Plug In BC initiatives in British Columbia. She sits on the board of NACFE (North American Council for Freight Efficiency), and is Co-Chair for Women of EVs, Canada chapter.
What first drew you to work in the electrification sector, and what has kept you in it?
I was driven by a desire to work somewhere where there was a clear opportunity for impact on emissions, and transportation felt like the most promising place for that. Early in my career I landed a role delivering green fleet programmes, and EVs were just beginning to emerge. They weren’t yet proven, very much an open question. There was something genuinely exciting about being at that frontier, working on something that hadn’t been figured out yet.
What’s kept me here is that feeling hasn’t gone away. We’re still in the middle of shaping the norms and the way fleet operators think about what’s possible, and it’s very much a collaborative space. At Geotab, I get to bring real-world data into those conversations to help advance the industry’s understanding, and challenge misconceptions. At Geotab we can see what’s actually happening in fleets: not what operators expect or what manufacturers claim, but what real vehicles do on real routes in real conditions. That’s a rare thing to be part of.
Geotab must now have tracked millions of EV journeys. What does that scale of real-world data tell us about fleet electrification that we simply couldn’t know otherwise?
The thing that’s hardest to get from any other source is scale. In 2025, Geotab-connected EVs travelled more than 870 million miles, and our battery health work drew on data from over 22,700 vehicles across 21 models over several years. At that volume, patterns that would look like noise in a smaller study become reliable insights on vehicle performance and capabilities.
What it keeps showing us – and what I find most useful when talking to fleet operators – is just how large the gap is between what people expect electrification to look like and what it’s actually like. Everyone focuses on the limitations of range and charging but we’ve shown there are many vehicle duty cycles that operate well within EV capabilities today. The questions shift from ‘can we do this?’ to much more practical ones: which vehicles first, what’s the best charging strategy for my fleet, how do we structure this financially. That’s a more interesting conversation to be having.
Why do you think some fleet operators still see electrification as a distant prospect, rather than a transition that can be made right now?
A lot of it comes down to the fact that the mental model many operators are working from is about five years out of date. The concerns I hear most often – vehicle selection, range limitations, battery reliability, charging options – were legitimate worries in 2018 or 2019, but they’ve been sticky even as the underlying reality has shifted. What’s less understood is that the transition is also genuinely hard in ways that have nothing to do with the technology. Procurement cycles, vehicle and route planning, site capacity, charging infrastructure, energy management, driver and technician training – all of these need to come together at once, and unlike conventional fleet management, there’s no established playbook yet. I’ve been involved in gap analysis and scorecard work that tries to map all of those interdependencies, and even for operators who are committed and well-resourced, the coordination challenge is real.
Our FOI analysis of UK city council fleets found EV share ranging from 3.2% at Transport for London to 44.5% in Bristol – and while some of that gap reflects outdated assumptions about the technology, a lot of it reflects genuine structural differences in how ready different organisations are to manage that kind of change. Our Taking Charge report analysed data from more than 1.3 million vehicles across seven countries and found 41% were EV suitable – meaning range-capable and economically viable to switch. For that group, projected savings averaged around $15,900 (roughly £10,000) per vehicle over seven years. So for close to half of fleet vehicles, the financial case is already there. The harder work now is change management: building the internal capacity, the cross-functional alignment, and the planning frameworks to actually execute the transition rather than just endorse it in principle.
What I find tends to move operators more than the numbers is seeing what it actually looks like when an organisation similar to theirs has already done it – Go-Ahead Group have deployed Geotab telematics across 6,000+ UK buses and are managing their electric fleet in real time using live state-of-charge data. That kind of operational visibility, at scale, is often more persuasive than a report.
Looking towards 2030, what do you think will be the biggest leap forward for widespread EV adoption in the commercial and fleet sector?
I think it’s the point at which vehicle operations and energy management stop being separate problems. We’re starting to see fleets use telematics not just to track where vehicles are, but to manage when and how they charge, how that interacts with grid demand, how to optimise across the whole system rather than vehicle by vehicle. That integration is still early, but over the next five years I expect it to become much more central to how fleets are run.
When that happens and both vehicles and energy systems are optimized, electrification stops being a sustainability decision and becomes a straightforward operational one – driven by the numbers and the business case, not by regulation or external pressure.
Geotab’s recent battery degradation survey shows just how remarkably slow modern EV batteries age. But have you found battery reliability to still be a perceived concern for operators, and if so, how can we address this?
Yes, it comes up all the time, and I get it – batteries are expensive, and the concern is legitimate even if the aggregate data keeps telling a more reassuring story. Our 2025 study covered over 22,700 vehicles across 21 models, with average annual degradation of 2.3%, putting average state of health at around 81.6% after eight years. That suggests batteries are genuinely outlasting the replacement cycles most fleets plan around.
That said, averages don’t tell the whole story for any individual vehicle. What I find more useful than the headline figures is what the data tells us about what’s actually driving degradation, because it shifts the conversation from reassurance to something operators can act on or better understand based on their unique situation. We’ve seen that frequent use of high-power DC fast charging is the single biggest operational stressor – vehicles relying heavily on charging above 100 kW average 3.0% degradation per year, roughly double the group that relies primarily on AC charging. That kind of data gives operators something to actually work with – not always a simple fix, since some duty cycles genuinely require high-power charging, but at least a clear understanding of what that means for battery longevity and how to weigh it against their operational constraints.
You were recently awarded as one of the Women Leading EV finalists. Why do initiatives like this matter, and what would you say to women considering a career in the EV industry who perhaps don’t see themselves reflected in it yet?
They matter because it’s hard to want something you can’t see. Early in my career I walked into my first industry workshop and was one of very few women there. I didn’t dwell on it at the time — I was too focused on learning – but looking back, the absence of visible role models does have an effect on what feels like a realistic path for you.
The EV space specifically has some genuinely impressive women in leadership roles, more than fleet has historically had, but it’s still not where it should be, particularly in the technical and software sides. Initiatives like WLEV help make those leaders visible, which I think is the most direct way to shift things.
For women considering the sector: the technology transition is bringing in people from broad perspectives and backgrounds, including energy, software and sustainability, to an industry that was traditionally more homogenous. I’d say don’t let an outdated picture of what this looks like put you off, and when you find the organisations and working groups where the problems you care about are being worked on, invest in those communities. That’s where the most useful relationships get built.
