The Petrol Crisis: What can we learn from it?

Posted 5th October 2021

We’ve all seen acres of coverage of queues at petrol stations and the problems that the fuel shortage has caused for individuals and industry – as well as plenty of lively discussion about what caused it all. The question now is: what can we do to mitigate ourselves and our businesses against similar problems in the future?

To find one obvious answer, we only need to look for those individuals who have remained consistently smug-looking throughout: electric vehicle owners. That the fuel crisis is going to accelerate the trend to ‘go electric’ became apparent from day one of the shortages: on Friday 24th September it was reported that online Google searches for electric cars had skyrocketed by 1,500%.

For businesses, there are many good reasons to follow suit: not least to enable staff to commute to the workplace and fleets to continue to operate efficiently – aside from the obvious sustainability benefits.

This shouldn’t really be news. As long ago as 2011, the government’s own official guidance on ‘Business Continuity Management for Fuel Shortages’ listed ‘Reducing the dependency of your organisation on fuel’ as number 1 on its suggested activities to prepare for a fuel supply disruption.

Of course, it’s not enough to simply move across to electric vehicles – there needs to be the infrastructure in place to support it. For business owners and fleet / logistics managers, this means taking control of their own charging infrastructure to provide a robust, efficient and – above all – reliable system.

Before the next crisis.