Mercury to expand EV subscription service

Mercury will invest $6 million to turbo-charge its EV subscription service.

It’s aiming to add around 50 EVs a month to lift its total EV subscription fleet to about 450 vehicles.

“This will open more doors for more Kiwis to more easily get behind the wheel of an EV,” Mercury chief marketing officer Julia Jack says.

The announcement of the programme’s expansion follows two years of it operating as a pilot.

During that time Mercury has worked to understand how to best design and price a service to meet the needs of subscription customers while being commercially sustainable.

“We’ve spent the last two years watching, testing and learning, and now we’re ready to deliver on a bigger scale,” Jack says.

“Key to this was identifying models that tick the boxes for people in terms of affordability, performance and practicality and the standout during this stage was the Nissan Leaf.”

For this reason Mercury will focus primarily on late-model Nissan Leafs for initial shipments but hopes to take advantage of an expanding range of EV models.

It’s expected that at full capacity Mercury’s service will see more than 500 people experience an EV in the first year alone. By switching from an internal combustion engine (ICE) car, these subscribers would contribute to taking a total of 1020 tonnes of CO2e out of the atmosphere annually.

Jack says that to truly shift the dial, New Zealand’s predominantly fossil-fuel powered transport system needed to better leverage the country’s largely renewable electricity system.

“We know upfront costs can be a major barrier for a lot of people when it comes to making the switch. Having an EV subscription service that stacks up economically removes these challenges.”

Ongoing vehicle ownership expenses like warrants of fitness, road user charges, and maintenance costs are becoming less palatable, Jack says.

“Both here and globally we’re seeing more people seriously consider subscription services in the wake of economic uncertainty caused by COVID-19. There’s much less appetite for ‘dead assets’ sitting in the driveway, depreciating by the minute.”

Mercury product and operations manager Kane Bublitz says Mercury’s two-year pilot of 60 EVs had proved that if an organisation could get the construct right, people genuinely wanted to go electric.

“At the moment we can’t keep up with the demand, and that’s a great problem to have. By adding 50 EVs to our fleet every month we can continue to meet the needs of our subscribers and hopefully help hundreds more people ‘kiss oil goodbye’.

“The electric revolution is quickly gaining momentum in New Zealand. The government has committed to its agencies converting to electric vehicles, and potential policies such as fleet emissions standards, “clean car” feebate schemes and bans on used fossil fuel vehicle imports are getting more and more airtime,” Bublitz says.

This should be a major signal to manufacturers that we’re ready for a greater variety of EV makes and models at a range of price points,” he said.

Visit evdrive.co.nz for more information.