In June, I demonstrated a tool for comparing the cost of switching a fleet from diesel to electric trucks. The discussion raised a question that a better calculation alone could not answer: where would this tool fit into the way a fleet owner actually makes a purchasing decision?
The feedback, as recorded in my meeting notes, was that fleet owners could already turn to their vehicle manufacturers and sales teams for advice on trucks, routes, and charging. We could build a useful model and still have work to do to establish why someone would use ours.
The conversation also touched on responsibility for energy at the depot. Buying a vehicle did not settle how the site would be supplied with electricity. That remained a decision for the fleet owner.
I keep returning to these two points together. One concerns the place a product occupies in a customer's decisions. The other concerns the things that have to exist around it. Both can disappear when we describe the challenge simply as getting people to adopt new technology.
What does “it works” establish?
An electric truck can perform its intended task. A model can calculate a plausible business case. Neither result, by itself, establishes that an operator can make the transition.
Consider a hypothetical fleet owner whose analysis suggests that electric vehicles could save money over their useful lives. Before signing, they still need to establish how the vehicles will be financed, where they will charge, whether the charging schedule fits the routes, and who will take responsibility for keeping the operation running.
A favourable lifetime calculation can coexist with a difficult cash requirement today. A suitable vehicle can coexist with an unsuitable site. Each unresolved dependency changes the purchase decision.
From the supplier’s side, this might look like hesitation. From the operator’s side, it may be an entirely reasonable response to an incomplete proposition.
That distinction matters. If we diagnose reluctance as a lack of understanding, we will produce more explanations. If the problem is financing or site readiness, those explanations will have limited effect.
What Perez helps me see
Carlota Perez’s Technological Revolutions and Financial Capital gives me a wider frame for this question.
She distinguishes installation, when new technologies and infrastructure emerge amid investment and disruption, from deployment, when their potential spreads more broadly through the economy. Her argument gives institutional change a central role: the arrangements inherited from an earlier technological era need to adapt before the new one can deliver its full benefits. carlotaperez.org ↗
I find this useful because it makes adoption a subject in its own right. The existence of a powerful technology does not settle how businesses will finance it, how organisations will work with it, or how its benefits will be distributed.
There is a limit to the analogy. Perez is describing historical transformations over decades. A fleet purchase is not a miniature technological revolution, and “installation” is not simply another word for a pilot. What I borrow from her is the attention to everything that must change alongside the technology.
Looking at an individual project, I would translate that into a practical question: what are we currently asking the buyer to assemble for themselves?
The work between the suppliers
A transition can involve several organisations whose responsibilities are perfectly clear within their own contracts.
The vehicle supplier delivers the vehicle. An infrastructure provider supplies charging equipment. A lender evaluates the financing. The fleet owner has to make these arrangements function together.
The difficult question is who owns their dependencies. Suppose a vehicle delivery date moves, or a site is not ready when expected. Who adjusts the plan? Who bears the additional cost? Which commitment needs to come first before another party can proceed?
These are hypothetical questions, rather than findings from that June conversation. But they are the questions it leaves me wanting to investigate.
It is easy to call this coordination. The word sounds almost clerical. In practice, it can involve changing a contract, moving a budget, accepting a risk, or giving someone authority they did not previously have.
Putting everyone at the same table may help establish the problem. Someone must still be able to make and carry out a decision.
When the calculation is not the missing piece
The feedback on our tool raises another possibility: perhaps we have misunderstood where the customer needs help.
A standalone analysis may seem valuable to its maker while duplicating advice the buyer already receives through an established relationship. In that situation, making the analysis more sophisticated might improve the product without improving its prospects.
I would want to find out whether the buyer distrusts the existing advice, needs an independent comparison, or struggles to bring several suppliers’ assumptions into one decision. Those would be reasons to use another tool. They need to be established.
This is an uncomfortable possibility because it brings the explanation back to the proposition itself. An external barrier is not always what stands between a good product and a sale. Sometimes the product needs to change. Sometimes the customer already has a satisfactory answer.
A useful account of the deployment gap has to allow for both.
Make the missing condition specific
“The market isn’t ready” leaves me with very little to work on.
I would rather know that the purchase cannot proceed until the depot has a viable energy plan. Or that the person who benefits from lower operating costs cannot approve the initial investment. Or that the proposed tool has no clear place in an existing buying process.
Each statement names something we can investigate. We can ask who owns the decision, what evidence they need, and what would have to change for them to proceed. We can also discover that the change would cost more than the opportunity justifies.
This is where I would begin assessing a deployment project: trace the next real purchase through the people, commitments, and conditions it depends on.
Then return to the fleet owner. What can they actually decide now? What are they still being asked to figure out?
Until we can answer those questions, another demonstration may tell us very little.