Octopus and CATL bring battery-swapping to UK fleets

HGV safety inspection fees jump from £55 to £70, bus and coach checks from £70 to £90, and trailer inspections from £40 to £50, all from Monday 6 July — the first rise in the ATF service fee since 2010, according to SMMT. That's fifteen years of frozen pricing catching up at once, across roughly 400 Authorised Testing Facility sites nationwide. Every heavy truck, trailer, bus and coach needs one of these annual inspections regardless, so the increase lands straight on SMR budgets with no way round it. Build it into next year's whole-life cost forecasts now rather than discovering it at the next MOT.

Cupra's Raval opens below the £25,000 mark that matters most for salary sacrifice uptake, with entry pricing from £23,785 and up to 277 miles of WLTP range from the 52kWh pack, per The Electric Car Scheme. At 4% BiK for 2026/27, that combination of low list price and low tax band is exactly the sweet spot scheme providers chase — expect it to undercut comparable MEB+ siblings on take-home cost once the £1,500 Electric Car Grant is applied to most trims. Pre-orders are open now for deliveries later in 2026, so get it into scheme car-choice lists before drivers ask why it isn't there.

The Climate Change Committee has told ministers, in terms, to leave the ZEV mandate alone: this year's review "must not lead to further concessions," warns the CCC's progress report, or the UK risks missing its 2030 climate target and deepening reliance on imported oil. ChargeUK, unsurprisingly, agrees — chief executive Vicky Read's argument is that further watering-down spooks the investors funding public chargepoints, which is exactly the infrastructure fleets going electric are counting on. The report also flags VAT and standing charges for review, so public charging costs could shift. Read the mandate as more fixed than fleet planners have assumed; procurement timelines built around further easing look shakier than they did.

ISA has been mandatory on new UK and EU vehicles since July 2024, but Thatcham's real-world testing exposes a measurement con-trick: approval bodies score accuracy across distance driven, not at the moment a speed limit actually changes, which flatters the numbers considerably. Even the best vehicle tested managed 98.4% on the distance measure but only 90.3% event-by-event; the worst dropped from 91.3% to 74.3%, meaning roughly one in four speed-limit readings was wrong, with some systems inventing limits of 5mph or 100mph that don't exist on UK roads. Any duty-of-care or driver-coaching policy leaning on ISA accuracy should treat the headline compliance figures as optimistic, not operational (Thatcham Research).

InstaVolt has bought 228 GeniePoint sites and their 260-plus chargers from Equans, pushing its network past 1,000 locations — a first for a UK charge point operator, and further consolidation in a market where fleets already juggle too many apps and RFID cards for comfort (InstaVolt). The catch: rebranding and upgrades, including battery storage and BYD ultra-rapid hardware, roll out over the next 12 months, so expect some site downtime and shifting reliability during the transition. Fleets routing drivers through former GeniePoint car parks and motorway services should check current tariffs hold and flag any outages before they hit route planning.

The rapid-charging build-out has quietly stopped being a London story: 7,044 of the 7,598 new rapid and ultra-rapid points added in the two years to April 2026 — 93 per cent — went in outside the capital, with the East of England up 95 per cent and the North West up 83 per cent (ChargeUK). For fleets running EVs on regional routes, that's the infrastructure gap closing faster than route-planning assumptions may have kept up with. Worth re-running your charging-corridor maps rather than trusting last year's dead spots.

Gridserve has doubled ultra-rapid capacity at its Solstice Park hub near Amesbury from eight to 16 bays, adding four 180kW-capable chargers alongside the existing 350kW units, per Gridserve. The site sits on the A303, the main pinch-point route linking London to Devon and Cornwall, so bay capacity there is a genuine constraint on EV fleet journeys west — not just a driver-experience nicety. With 350kW hardware capable of adding 100 miles in roughly ten minutes, queuing time was the real bottleneck; doubling throughput should ease that on peak travel days, though whether it holds up through summer bank holidays remains to be seen.

Cap hpi's latest used-van outlook runs forecasts across the full 12-to-60-month spread, and it's the breadth that matters here as much as the numbers: LCV operators cycling vans early get a different residual story to those holding for five years, and this update is built to show both. The overview also tracks how its own past forecasts have held up against actual market moves — useful cover if you're defending a depreciation assumption to finance. Worth pulling before you lock in the next replacement cycle's residual assumptions. (cap hpi)

Older stock is quietly outperforming newer arrivals: hybrids took 90% of the top 10 spots for margin, CAP Clean performance and sales volume on Dealer Auction's platform in May, with the Volvo XC60 leading trade profits despite the average vehicle now sitting at 5.5 years old and over 41,000 miles — both record highs for the report. Retail margins on AFVs overall are sliding, down £500 month-on-month, but hybrid's growing share of the mix suggests buyers trust proven mid-life powertrains over younger EVs. Worth weighting disposal timing and part-ex expectations accordingly.

DVSA's new special notice 01-26 tightens the rules for approved tachograph centres across England, Scotland and Wales, covering smart tachograph 2 fitment, software upgrades and calibration procedure. The detail on when a vehicle needs smart tachograph 2, and when a software upgrade is due, is exactly the sort of thing a busy workshop can miss and an examiner won't. Push your tachograph provider to confirm they've read it and updated their process — a compliant fleet is only as good as the calibration centre behind it.

Cash allowance versus company car remains the wrong binary for EV-minded fleets, according to Loveelectric: salary sacrifice still strips out Income Tax and National Insurance in a way a taxed cash lump sum never can. The Chancellor has redrawn some of the rules, but the operator's read is that the changes bite less than the headlines suggested, with the bigger reset not landing until 2029. That gives fleets a real window to lock in savings now rather than defaulting drivers into allowances out of caution. Anyone benchmarking take-home pay across the two routes should factor BIK rates and grant eligibility into the comparison, not just gross cost.

At 4% benefit-in-kind for 2026/27, the Polestar 4 lands squarely in the sweet spot that's making salary sacrifice schemes so hard to argue against right now, per The Electric Car Scheme. The Long Range Single Motor's 385-mile WLTP figure from £53,750 gives drivers Model Y-rivalling range without the compromise, and salary sacrifice takes 20-50% off a personal lease depending on tax band. For fleets still weighing SUV-coupé novelty against practicality, the tax maths alone should get this onto the shortlist — the low BIK does most of the persuading before range or charging speed even enter the conversation.

167.1p a litre — that's where diesel closed the week, down 5.3p, with petrol off 2.2p to 151.0p, according to DESNZ. A drop that size in a single week is the kind of move that makes last quarter's Advisory Fuel Rate look stale fast. Any fleet still reimbursing diesel drivers at the old rate is now overpaying per mile — worth a quick recheck before it becomes a habit rather than a blip.

Zero-emission cars were 23% of new UK car registrations, up from 19% a year earlier — the clearest read on how fast the parc is electrifying, and on the used-EV supply that lands in fleets two to three years out. (DfT)