Fleet operators avoid multi-million-pound hardware replacement costs as VEV brings legacy BYD bus chargers under control
London, UK (25 February 2026)
Bus fleet operators facing limited visibility and reliability issues with earlier-generation BYD depot chargers now have a route to avoid multi-million-pound hardware replacement, after VEV’s engineering team delivered a targeted integration for legacy BYD chargers within its VEV-IQ platform.
By enabling operators to manage earlier-generation BYD chargers within a modern charge point management environment, VEV provides a practical alternative to wholesale replacement programmes that could cost larger fleets millions of pounds.
The company estimates operators may be able to extend the operational life of existing BYD chargers by five to 10 years, protecting capital budgets and avoiding early replacement of chargers that remain functional but need modernised monitoring and control.
Over the past decade, operators have invested heavily in BYD electric buses and associated depot charging infrastructure across the UK and internationally.
Much of this equipment was installed before open charging standards such as OCPP became widely adopted, creating ongoing challenges around interoperability, system monitoring and long-term software support, particularly where OEM maintenance contracts are no longer in place.
To address these challenges, VEV’s engineering team has developed a robust integration within its VEV-IQ platform for selected earlier-generation BYD chargers.
The project reflects the depth of engineering capability behind VEV-IQ, an enterprise-grade charge point management system designed for fleets, with security, reliability and scalability at its core. The award-winning platform is certified by the Open Charge Alliance for OCPP, the industry-standard protocol used to connect chargers to management systems. Through VEV’s integration, legacy BYD chargers are enabled to communicate using OCPP within VEV-IQ, bringing them into a modern, standards-based operating environment and allowing them to be managed alongside newer infrastructure through a single dashboard.
In addition to monitoring, VEV-IQ have developed bespoke load management to optimise charging within site grid constraints, an increasingly common challenge for large depots, where exceeding capacity can trigger disruption, penalties and wider operational risk.
By bringing legacy chargers into VEV-IQ, operators also reduce cyber and operational risk through stronger visibility, access control and oversight of legacy infrastructure.
The platform also enables faster fault diagnosis of both EV chargers and vehicles, supporting more targeted maintenance and reducing costs from maintenance and downtime on routes.
Hanno Klausmeier, VP Software Engineering at VEV, said: “Fleet electrification rarely follows a single, uniform path. Operators are managing a mix of earlier-generation and next-generation infrastructure, often under significant operational pressure. We are experiencing considerable challenges, with unsupported charger failures sometimes taking months to resolve due to limited visibility of faults within closed systems.
“Our work with legacy BYD chargers demonstrates the scale and maturity of the reverse engineering capability behind the VEV-IQ team. This is not about one-off integrations: it is about investing in a flexible, scalable platform that can bring diverse infrastructure into a secure, modern, and optimized operating environment. This will protect the massive investment in charging infrastructure our customers made in the past.
“By bringing these chargers into VEV-IQ, we’re giving operators the insight, control and optimisation they expect from modern infrastructure, without forcing premature and costly hardware replacement, maintaining a unified view on all chargers regardless of whether the chargers are old – and don’t necessarily respect modern OCPP standards – or new.”
As fleets transition towards increasingly standardised and higher-powered charging estates, software-led integration, backed by deep in-house engineering capability, is emerging as a critical tool in protecting infrastructure investments, maintaining service reliability and enabling depots to evolve without unnecessary financial disruption.
ENDS
Notes to editors
For interviews with VEV or more information, please contact Sue Terpilowski, sue@imageline.co.uk or Vy Le, pr@imageline.co.uk, 0207 689 9009
For media inquiries or further information, please contact media@vev.com VEV’s media kit is available here.
About VEV
VEV helps organisations deliver on their carbon reduction ambitions with an end-to-end fleet electrification solution that integrates across vehicles, charging infrastructure and power. VEV is owned by Vitol, a world leader in energy, which to date has committed circa $2 billion to sustainable energy initiatives worldwide.
VEV navigates the complexities of EV transformation to design and implement cost-effective EV fleets optimised for specific fleet requirements. It supports EV fleet operations to guarantee resilience and keep mission-critical fleets running at scale. Bespoke, scalable business solutions are designed around the customer’s own fleet data, analysed by a powerful assessment tool, VEV-IQ, and VEV’s experts in energy and sustainable e-mobility. VEV sets businesses up for success in an electrified future.
More information at www.www.www.vev.com
