How Siemens Turned Small SUVs Into Service Vehicles — with Adam Orth

Your service vehicle may be built around assumptions that stopped being true years ago.

At Siemens, Adam Orth and his team went into the field to see how technicians were actually using their vehicles — and found vans carrying more empty space than equipment, underused shelving, and jobs that no longer required the setups they once did.

In this episode, Adam explains how Siemens rethought parts of its service fleet around the work itself — from moving some roles into SUVs to redesigning upfits around what technicians actually need. He also shares why fleet leaders should question one-for-one replacement, get closer to the field, and be willing to change the vehicle when the job has already changed.

This episode is sponsored by Element Fleet Management.

Chapters:

0:00 — What Kind of Service Vehicle?

2:12 — Why Siemens is one of GM's largest EV commercial customers

5:39 — What Germany's EV sales numbers reveal about US infrastructure

7:59 — The question that should come before 'which EV'

10:45 — Throwing out the fleet playbook — and why it wasn't just about EV

14:12 — 'The scroll of excuses' Adam hears every day

16:28 — The revelation: from vans to Equinox

21:31 — One ladder nearly killed the whole plan

23:09 — The upfit rebuild — killing cookie-cutter shelving

26:56 — 'Hauling air' — what the field study actually found

29:00 — How Siemens thought about the SUV strategy across states

32:05 — What field feedback surfaced about charging speed

37:34 — Wind, hills, cold, towing — the range argument fact-checked

51:19 — The four things that quietly stacked in EV's favor

53:19 — Advice for fleets early in the EV transition