Fleet Electrification 2026: Planning an Electric Fleet, Simplifying Home Charging, and Keeping Costs Under Control

Fleet managers are currently facing one of the biggest transitions in years: the electrification of their fleets. But which vehicles are truly the right fit? How can employees charge their vehicles at home without the company having to install expensive wall boxes? And how can you keep administrative overhead under control amid all this? In this issue, we share practical insights from the panel discussion with Fraunhofer, introduce our new partnership with driiveme, show how AI-powered document management becomes even smarter with consolidated invoices, and explain why Fleet Plug@Home is rethinking home charging. Enjoy the read!

Electrifying the fleet sounds good at first, but in practice, the real questions quickly arise: Which vehicles truly meet our needs? How do I realistically calculate the costs? And how do I get employees on board who have never driven an electric car before?

During the panel discussion at AZOWO NEXT Day, we talked about exactly that with Vanessa Hindinger from EnBW, Tobias Prechtl from Munich Airport, and Theresa Strobel-Vogt from Fraunhofer IAO. Some companies are still just getting started, while others are already well into the process. This is also the case at Fraunhofer IAO. Theresa Strobel-Vogt explained the importance of electric mobility there:

“Electric mobility is generally a high priority at Fraunhofer IAO, not only in the vehicle fleet but also as a research topic. The institute addresses many research topics related to sustainable mobility: from bidirectional charging to electric mobility and charging infrastructure. The fleet is not yet fully electric, but the goal is to transition to a fully electric fleet in the future. The infrastructure for this is already very well developed. Through the LamA (Charging at the Workplace) project, Fraunhofer has charging options throughout Germany. This is because it became clear that many employees have never driven electric cars and are very unsure about charging. There are also still some reservations about electric mobility, especially regarding range. This will definitely become an issue: How can we better engage employees? For example, through gamification approaches or other measures to increase acceptance."

What Fraunhofer describes here is something many fleet managers know from their own experience. The infrastructure is growing, the will is there, but the electrification process brings with it many unanswered questions. That’s exactly why we’ve created a free e-mobility checklist:

✔️ Which vehicles are truly suitable for your fleet

✔️ How to realistically calculate TCO, including hidden costs

✔️ Which charging concept fits your actual usage patterns

✔️ How to set up internal structures, responsibilities, and KPIs

✔️ Which mistakes cost companies the most during the EV transition

No fleet management system can do it all on its own. And it doesn’t have to, as long as the right partners are on board. At AZOWO, we’re constantly evolving, listening closely to the issues that truly matter to fleet managers, and consistently expanding our all-in-one platform around those needs. Through close collaboration with leading technology and mobility providers, our ecosystem is growing continuously. Here’s what we can reveal: Things are not going to slow down anytime soon.

We’re kicking things off with a new partnership that solves a problem that regularly arises in day-to-day fleet operations: Who gets the vehicle from A to B? Whether it’s transfers between locations, delivering a company car directly to an employee, picking up a vehicle upon return, or driving it to the repair shop—all of this takes time that fleet managers simply don’t have.

Effective immediately, driiveme is part of the AZOWO ecosystem. driiveme is the European market leader in vehicle transfers, customer deliveries, and vehicle pickups, and works with over 4,000 companies. All trips are trackable in real time, liability insurance is included, and covers the transport up to 130,000 euros.

With over one million transports completed, 98% customer satisfaction, and operations in nine countries, driiveme brings exactly the reliability that a strong partner network needs.

Documents in a fleet can quickly pile up: invoices, traffic violations, contracts. Anyone who manages all of this manually spends more time on administrative tasks than on optimizing the fleet.

With the AI document management feature of the AZOWO Mobility Cloud, we’ve started to reduce this very burden. And we’re consistently expanding it.

Step 1: AI Document Management Upload documents; AI reads them, and relevant information is automatically stored in the system. The foundation for everything that follows.

Step 2: AI Violation Management Upload traffic violations; AI automatically creates the violation record, pre-fills all relevant information, and notifies the responsible recipients via email.

🆕Step 3: Consolidated Invoices One invoice, multiple vehicles—until now, a manual process that quickly adds up for large fleets. Costs must be extracted individually, assigned to the correct vehicles, and correctly entered into the TCO. If this isn’t done properly, the final calculation will be inaccurate.

From now on, a single upload is all it takes. The AI reads the consolidated invoice, automatically creates a separate document for each vehicle listed, and correctly allocates the costs. This way, the individual costs flow directly and accurately into the TCO without any manual follow-up work.

More and more companies are switching their fleets to electric vehicles. One question almost always comes up: How can employees charge their company cars at home without having to cover the electricity costs themselves, and how can the company bill them in a legally compliant manner and with reasonable effort?

Until now, the answer has been unsatisfactory. Either employees resorted to expensive public charging stations, which significantly increased the TCO, or the company invested in calibrated wall boxes at employees’ homes, with costs of up to 3,000 euros per installation, plus maintenance and organizational overhead in the event of a move or employee turnover. On top of that, billing data from various sources had to be manually consolidated—a process prone to errors, time-consuming, and often resulting in charging costs being included in cost accounting only belatedly or incompletely.

Since January 2026, the legal situation has changed. Vehicle-internal data may now officially be used as proof of electricity consumed. A calibrated wallbox is no longer mandatory.

This is exactly where Fleet Plug@Home comes in. Employees register their home charging station once in the AZOWO Mobility Cloud and can then charge at any available wallbox or standard outlet. The charging data—kilowatt-hours, charging duration, and battery level—flows directly from the vehicle to the platform. Billing occurs automatically on a monthly basis, and employee changes can be easily managed without the need to remove hardware.

For fleet managers, this means full transparency: All charging processes are fully documented and accessible at any time, including electricity prices, times, and assignment to the respective company car. This ensures you are well-prepared for any audit.

Fleet Plug@Home is flexible in its application, either as a module within the AZOWO Mobility Cloud or as a standalone solution that can be integrated into existing software environments.