A modern way to manage an ambulance fleet

In East London there is a new facility that’s shaking up the way that ambulances are managed with an eye to the expansion of the electric fleet and the need to be efficient in all aspects; it’s a model that’s already gathering a lot of interest.

Rob Macintosh is the Associate Director of Fleet at London Ambulance Service. He joined five years ago and has also worked for Welsh Ambulance Service so is steeped in the sector. He proudly showed me around the new fleet hub in Canning Town – near the Star Lane stop on the Docklands Light Railway and past a piano that someone has oddly abandoned in a hedgerow.

It’s an auspicious start to my visit to a large metal warehouse that used to be focused on commissioning – getting new ambulances ready to go on the road – but now has been gutted and repurposed to take on the functions from two other workshops and allow Rob’s team to fundamentally change the way they work.

One of those big changes is that they can use their new hub to do MOTs in-house. Even Rob is having the training (he trained as a mechanic back in the day) to make sure that they don’t lose a member of the team for hours taking a vehicle to a garage to do this regular but necessary job. It’s an efficiency in time rather than money, he says.

An area of growth is the number of electric ambulances. LAS has four on the run at the moment with plenty in the pipeline and they have different needs to their diesel equivalents. Rob’s team has completed training to be Ford technicians so they can do any servicing in-house. It’s not just the electric ambulances that come from Ford, LAS has invested in the Ford Mustang and the Ford Explorer. The latter sits proudly outside waiting to be dispatched to its first job, it’s one of 40 new 4×4 vehicles to hit London’s roads.

One of the questions Rob is asked most often is whether an electric ambulance has the range to cope with the demands of frontline work. In practice, he says, a single charge comfortably powers an ambulance through a full 12-hour shift, giving the service confidence that the technology can meet operational demands.

We talk about the lifetime costs (looking at 7-8 years) of electric versus diesel/petrol and Rob says that overall it’s about the same, but the difference is seen year by year. He explains:

“So what we’re finding is in year one there’s very little difference. In year two and three, what we’re noticing is if we’ve got the diesel equivalent in the workshop, we are changing pads, discs, dropping oils, and the vehicle’s in for three or four hours for the full service.

“For the electric vehicle, we will top up the screen wash, change the pollen filter, and it’s out. The brakes aren’t wearing anywhere near as quickly and there are no oils to change, so it’s just our checks on the ambulance side.”

He thinks, based on the experience of the oldest electric ambulance, which is now two and a half years old, they have reduced the amount of time working on it for a service by 75 per cent. Scale that up to a fleet of dozens of electric ambulances in the future, that’s a significant saving in both time and maintenance. Of course, that depends on a resilient charging infrastructure. During 2025/26, LAS installed 288 EV chargers across 18 sites, with more than a quarter of Trust sites due to be fully electrified as part of the wider rollout. The ambition is for every Trust site to have charging facilities in place by 2028.

Changing the ambulance fleet is a team effort and there is a lot of work done to include staff well beyond the fleet team as part of a working group to test out ideas, see what’s working, what isn’t and to work out how to implement change. Whether that’s a new all-purpose screen in the front of the cab, a new Stryker stretcher system that takes away the physical burden of lifting a patient to a lighting system that improves visibility on the road.

Change can mean improving the wellbeing of the paramedic or shaving seconds off repetitive tasks like opening doors, waiting for steps to fold away or the speed that the stretcher comes out. “This is our fourth generation ambulance. Every time we start a new vehicle build, there should be an improvement. There should be something better. We should never build the same vehicle twice,” he cautions, adding that they steal with pride and other trusts do the same as everyone seeks improvement that boosts patient care and safety.

As we explore the fleet hub, we come across the tyres which may appear benign but there are issues as Rob explains. The main issue with tyres is complexity and inefficiency in how they’re currently managed. Because modern tyres are directional, each wheel can only be used on one side of the vehicle, which doubles the number of spare wheels needed and demands large storage space. Wheels and tyres are heavy, creating significant manual handling demands.

Traditionally, an external contractor fits tyres, requiring lots of pre-built wheel/tyre assemblies. Rob and his team are shifting to doing tyre fitting in-house, stocking mainly loose tyres and reusing existing wheels, to cut storage needs, reduce costs, and lessen heavy lifting while improving flexibility.

Another area of change for Rob’s team is the way they run their stores. They have outsourced it to a company called Fleet Factors but they are part of the building and occupy a new space to the side of the main workshop. Accessible, just in time supply means that they can be agile and not have masses of stock on site that isn’t needed. Rob isn’t afraid to change things up and he’s keen on a phrase that captures his philosophy: “If there’s no process to train people into, they’re just teaching people to do the wrong thing more confidently.”

With three new vehicles waiting to be commissioned, three in the workshop and three on their way out to join an ambulance station somewhere in London, it’s a busy workshop but there’s a calm professionalism about the place and – thanks to some modern ventilation – thankfully no smell. The unplanned repairs that come along every day along with the routine maintenance keep this new facility busy and with the important administration and support teams all re-located to this venue, the team is complete and ready to keep the fleet on the road.

To read similar articles, check out our Frontline channel.

Rob will be speaking at The Emergency Services Show on 17 September as part of the new Fleet of the Future stage. Join him and others from the ambulance service as they explore the issues and challenges of ambulance conversion and the drive to net zero. Register to attend here.