If you run a small fleet and you’ve ever asked a bank to help you finance a new vehicle — electric or not — you’ve probably heard some version of the same answer: not yet.
Not enough history. Not enough paperwork. Not the kind of business we know how to underwrite.
Here’s the thing most fleet owners never get to see: what that conversation looks like from the other side of the table. We recorded one. Our CEO Su Sanni sat down with the two partners behind our latest electric vehicle deployment in New York — Zeti, the fleet-data platform, and Chestnut Run Capital Partners, the capital provider — and talked openly about why lenders hesitate on small fleets, and what actually made this deal happen.
▶️ Watch the full conversation (34 min):
Why lenders hesitate — and it's not what you think
It isn’t that your business is bad. It’s that lenders can’t see it.
Jon Stafford, Zeti’s Chief Commercial Officer, has spent two decades in fleet management and now works with dozens of lenders across the country. The pattern he describes on EVs: lenders carry a “perceived risk” around electric vehicles because the technology is newer here — they don’t know the resale values, and they can’t tell whether the asset is out there earning or sitting in a lot.
And as Su puts it in the conversation, small transportation businesses often don’t have the thick underwriting file — the audited statements, the CFO-built projections — that traditional lenders are set up to evaluate. The business can be solid and the answer still comes back not yet, because on paper there isn’t enough to say yes to.
What changed: your operating data is the credit story
The unlock in this deal wasn’t a better pitch. It was visibility.
Every vehicle in the deployment reports real operating data — miles driven, utilization, asset value, even emissions avoided — onto a platform all three partners can see at the same time. A lender doesn’t have to guess whether the vehicles are earning. As Jon says in the podcast, they can watch the assets “turning miles, generating revenue.”
Why should you care? His next line is the one that matters: managing that perceived risk is how you get better rates for operators, so their businesses pencil out. Perceived risk is priced into every loan a small fleet is offered. Shrink the risk, shrink the price.
In other words: if you run your vehicles hard and run them well, that operating record — not a stack of paperwork — can become the strongest part of your credit story. That’s a game small operators can actually win.
Three things worth taking from this
- A “no” from a traditional lender isn’t a verdict on your business. It usually means the lender couldn’t see enough. The gap is visibility, not viability.
- Utilization is everything. A vehicle that’s moving is an asset; a vehicle that’s parked is a liability — to you and to how a lender prices you. It’s the same math we’ve talked about when it comes to keeping vehicles earning.
- You don’t have to build this capital stack alone. Blending state programs with private capital — the way this deal stacked NYSERDA-backed execution with Chestnut Run’s financing — is exactly the model we run so individual operators don’t have to negotiate it themselves.
Where Dollaride fits
This is the machinery behind the programs we bring to fleet owners. Through CTAP — The Clean Transit Access Program — qualified NYC fleets get into electric vehicles without the large upfront capital that usually kills the conversation, with charging and support included. The financing partnerships in this podcast are how that keeps scaling: as Su says in the close, this deal is a rung on a ladder toward electrifying thousands of these vehicles across New York.
If you operate a fleet in NYC and want to know whether you qualify, start here: dollaride.com/ctap — or book a call with our team and we’ll walk your routes and numbers with you.
Prepared by Dollaride with Claude.