Industrial industry fleets: A look at the latest numbers

This year’s Industry Fleet Sustainability Ranking looks at eight different industries in Europe, diving deep into the stand-out fleet trends from the past couple of years. To create the sustainability ranking, we perform in-depth benchmarking on each industry. Detailed reports for six of the target industries are also available to download.

In the sixth blog in our series exploring sustainability in industry fleets, we turn our attention to the industrial industry in Europe, and how its fleets have changed in recent years. For more insights, download the full benchmark report!

Europe’s industrial industries continued to favour the C1 car segment – it remained the most popular for the third year running, despite its share decreasing slightly. Premium car segments also decreased in popularity, their share of industrial industry fleets dropping by three percentage points since 2019.

Time to reveal the industry’s most popular car of 2021: the Volkswagen Passat, topping this chart for the third year in a row. However, the BMW 3 Series is slowly closing the gap, increasing in popularity more than any other model. It was not even ranked in the top 10 in 2019, but had reached third place by 2021.

The industrial industry is following similar fleet electrification trends to other industries benchmarked in this series. In 2021, the plug-in hybrid (PHEV) fleet share grew to 16.9%, making it the second most popular powertrain, with diesel still in first position at a 51.1% fleet share. But it might not be that way for long: despite diesel remaining the most popular fuel type in European industrial industry fleets, it seems to be declining year by year. Since 2019, the share of diesel has fallen by 24.6%, while hybrids, PHEVs and battery electric vehicles (BEVs) have more than doubled in the same period.

Norway is far ahead of other countries when it comes to the share of BEVs in industrial fleets: 53.3%, with the second-largest share found in the Netherlands, at a much lower 28.7%. Overall, nine out of 13 countries have seen their industrial industry fleets increase their share of BEVs, but none comes close to the level seen in Norway.

Meanwhile, the share of diesel has declined in all countries, and, in a key milestone, the Netherlands is the first to report a single-digit diesel share in industrial fleets, at 4.4%. The Netherlands does, however, have a much higher share (47.7%) of petrol vehicles than other countries in the benchmark.

While overall CO2 emissions from industrial industry fleets are down on average, the numbers differ greatly per country. Average emissions in Norwegian industrial fleets dropped dramatically from 110.9 grams per kilometre in 2020 to 36 grams per kilometre in 2021 – an improvement largely due to the hugely increased share of BEVs and PHEVs.

A few countries, on the other hand, saw increases in average CO2 emissions, deviating from the trends observed across most industries and countries. Industrial industry fleets in Belgium, Spain, Italy and Poland all increased their CO2 emission averages, with emissions in Poland, for instance, rising from 124 grams per kilometre to 130.6 grams per kilometre between 2019 and 2021.

Overall, the main trend seen in the industrial industry’s European fleets is the movement away from diesel and petrol vehicles towards other powertrains. Since 2019, BEVs, PHEVs and hybrids have all made large gains in their fleet shares (8.2, 10.1 and 8.1 percentage points respectively) – a promising sign that bodes well for the future!