High Tech Environmental Vehicles for High Tech Environmental Equipment Supplier

Here is a conundrum.

What do you do if you are a leading environmental monitoring technology supply firm, specialising in air quality monitoring, and your single biggest environmental impact comes from your own fleet of company vehicles?

The problem is compounded when you factor in your large team of field service engineers travelling the length and breadth of the UK and your ISO 14001 environmental management system expecting you to minimise your impacts and make environmental improvements.

Stroud based Enviro Technology Services (ET) has gone away, done it’s homework and come up with a solution that benefits the company, the environment and company vehicle drivers.

The company has ordered five Mitsubishi Outlander PHEV plug-in hybrid SUV’s and at the time of writing, taken delivery of two. These technologically advanced vehicles have a zero-emissions battery range of 30 miles and a clean-burn, low-NOx petrol engine that is used at higher speeds and to recharge the battery on the move. Mitsubishi claim a combined MPG figure of over 100 and low CO2 emissions, making it a compelling case for the company, the drivers and the environment.

ET’s Duncan Mounsor explains: “long before and ever since we became ISO14001 certified we’ve known that transportation is not only one of our largest financial costs but also contributes our largest impact upon the environment”.

With the largest team of air quality monitoring service engineers in the UK, all needing to get themselves and their servicing kit to sites in every corner of the UK on a daily basis, traditionally ET has purchased diesel fuelled vans and cars.

Duncan continues: “as air quality monitoring experts, we’ve always known that diesel is a comparatively dirty fuel, and have from a business perspective, put fuel economy first and also focused on the once much lower CO2 emissions of diesel over petrol. We are no strangers to the benefits of hybrids in the ET vehicle fleet, and have over the years trialled and purchased several types, from Toyota Prius to Lexus RX.”

“However” Duncan concludes: “the Mitsubishi PHEV plug-in hybrid really does tick all the right boxes for us. It’s large enough to accommodate all the kit a service engineer or salesperson would ever need to transport, it offers 4WD for our remote rural monitoring sites and of course it is incredibly economical to run and has low (or even zero) CO2 emissions. We’re always naturally sceptical of manufacturers claimed MPG figures, but it will certainly be much better than those of the vehicles they will be replacing, along with next to no PM10 or PM2.5 emissions which can’t be a bad thing, given the UK’s urban air pollution problems”.