There is a huge amount of pressure and responsibilty on us all to live, work and do business in as sustainable as possible way.
The problem is when you sell vehicles for a living it becomes more of a challenge to try and tackle. As most vehicle manufacturers move over to electric (and even hydrogen) vehicles, the typical WAV (which are usually based on slightly older versions of cars) are a “few” years behind. The electric versions of popular wheelchair accessible vehicles are not quite there… yet.
We started selling two electric wheelchair accessible vehicles this year and we hope our EV range will increase further over the coming year. However although there is a great deal of interest in these vehicles, the majority of our customers are still buying traditional diesel or petrol WAVs – this is partly due to the higher cost of EVs (although this will come down in time) and concerns about infrastructure.
We eagerly await the advent of more electric choices for wheelchair accessible vehicle customers, but there are unqiue challenges for vehicle converters – because the batteries are put under the floor it makes it harder to lower the floor for wheelchair users.
How we’re going green…
EV Charging points
In the last year we have installed two electric vehicle charging points, these are used by us to charge the electric WAVs when required and are used by our staff and other businesses on site to charge their own electric vehicles. (there are more EVs in the car park every year)
Paperless office
Over the last year we have moved to a paperless system for our vehicle hire. In the past we had to print hire agreements off and get the customers to sign. We’ve now moved over to a digital system, all the hire details are displayed on a tablet device and the customer signs the agreement digitally and is emailed a copy.
This has reduced our print output substantially, in fact so substantially we have switched to a smaller more energy efficient printer (and of course we use recycled paper!)
Efficiency savings
We have installed LED lighting throughout the business along with light sensors which switch the lights off when no one is in the room… Over a year this has definitely saved electricity!
A green website
This year our website was moved to servers which are powered by 100% renewable energy (solar and wind)
Generating our own power
The biggest contribution in our quest to be greener was to install solar panels on our roof. We’ve been running our solar panels for over three years and this year we generated over 44,000kW of electricity! Over the course of the year that’s more than enough to cover the entire electricity requirements of WavsGB, and our sister company VansGB alone. We share this power throughput the Marksbury Business Centre building so we’re helping a few other businesses to go greener too!
It’s only a start but over the coming year (and years) we hope to be able to reduce our carbon footprint further and increase our range of non-internal combustion engine vehicles.
