A delivery company running two hundred vans through a city does not buy vehicles the way you or I buy a car.

It buys a spreadsheet.

For a fleet like that, total cost of ownership is the whole decision: energy, uptime, maintenance, financing, and what the vehicle is worth when it comes back. Emotion does not enter it. And on a high-utilisation urban route, the electric van is starting to win that spreadsheet - lower energy per kilometre, fewer moving parts, city ranges it can easily meet.

But there is one number that decides whether the case holds: residual value. A three-year-old electric van is not compared only with other used vans. It is compared with a newer electric one that is cheaper, goes further and charges faster. If residuals fall faster than expected, the whole ownership case inverts.

Which brings me to something Jürgen Lobach of FINN wrote this week.

He described a future - drawing on Theresa Schleicher's work - where ownership fades and access wins: subscription, sharing, refurbishment, a car that finds you rather than one you hunt for. I think he is right about the direction. Younger buyers and smart fleets increasingly want access, not a title deed.

But here is the part the access story quietly skips.

When nobody owns the vehicle, the depreciation risk does not disappear. It moves. Someone still holds the asset when its value drops - and in a subscription model, that someone is the provider, or the bank behind them. Access is wonderful for the user precisely because it hides the residual-value problem from them. It does not remove it. It concentrates it.

So the future of mobility may well be access over ownership. But whoever runs that model inherits the hardest question in this industry: what is the vehicle worth when it comes back?

The consumer market runs on desire. The access economy runs on residuals. And the residuals are exactly where this gets decided.