Most lithium conversion proposals start with a battery vendor's own utilization numbers. That's not dishonest — it's just one-sided by design. A vendor's platform is built to prove their equipment works, not to tell you whether a conversion was the right call for your specific fleet in the first place.

Three blind spots show up in almost every vendor-led proposal:

1. It only sees its own brand. A battery-tied platform can't see the chargers, trucks, or competing batteries also running in your fleet — so it can't tell you how the whole operation is actually performing.

2. It has no reason to find the cheaper answer. If the data showed you didn't need a $2M lithium conversion — that your current lead-acid fleet just needed right-sizing — that's not a story the seller is incentivized to tell.

3. It stops at the sale. Once the conversion is signed, most vendor dashboards shift to performance monitoring, not ongoing validation of whether the original business case actually played out.

An independent audit removes all three blind spots by design — because the platform doing the measuring has nothing riding on which way the data points.

What Independent Data Actually Shows

This is where the SCORE Program's own audit data is useful — not as a sales pitch, but as a pattern. Across the fleets SCT has audited:

• Roughly 70% of fleets use less than half of their available battery capacity on a given day. That's not a lithium problem or a lead-acid problem — it's a sizing problem that exists regardless of chemistry.

• One 20-site grocery network found $556,100 in stranded capital in 75 days — $323,400 of it from battery right-sizing alone — without touching a single truck route or signing a conversion.

• A separate audit at a large retail distribution site found battery sizing assumptions were off by 60–75% from actual use.

In both cases, the fleet thought they had a lithium decision to make. What they actually had was a sizing decision — and no way to tell the difference until someone measured the fleet independently of the equipment that was already running on it.

That's the sequence that matters: audit first, decide second. Not the other way around.

Validate Before You Sign

Before you sign off on a conversion, make sure the number behind it came from someone with nothing to sell. The SCORE Program's audit runs independently of any equipment purchase — free, no-commitment, and built to answer one question: does your fleet actually need this, or just need to be sized correctly?