Last-mile delivery vans are increasingly transforming the way we shop, the way we receive services at home, and even the way we deliver food. And as the truck fleet expands to meet this demand, it’s mostly electric.
A wake-up call to how quickly this change can sweep the industry comes in 2019, when Amazon announced plans to buy 100,000 electric trucks from Rivian over the years — before the vehicle is even built. and before Rivian creates anything. Since then, electric trucks from Ford and Stellantis have been confirmed to arrive next year – e-Transits and electric Ram ProMasters respectively – while GM’s trucks, under a new business form called BrightDrop, were delivered in small quantities.
In addition, it should be noted 2022 Ford F-150 Lightning, the 2023 Chevy Silverado, and Ram 1500 all-electric will launch around 2024. Each of these are electric pickups that will be offered in fleet-oriented configurations.
This week, Stellantis announced that an agreement with Amazon will put “thousands of BEV ProMasters on the road each year” on Amazon’s delivery fleet, indicating that Amazon’s business deal with the company will continue into the era. of electric trucks, along with Rivian. Likewise, GM’s BrightDrop announced that Walmart had agreed to pre-order 5,000 of its trucks for last-mile delivery; FedEx has also pre-ordered 2,500 trucks and will purchase an additional 20,000 over the next few years. Ford meanwhile announced last November that E-Transit . series sold out in the first year of production, with about 25,000 pre-orders.
First BrightDrop EV600 truck delivered to FedEx
With smaller solutions from Electric Last Mile Solutions (ELMS) on the way, from Canoo in operation, and larger retrofit solutions from companies like Motiv and Lightning eMotors, market expansion will continue. continued for a while.
More money in services than sales margins?
In addition to truck sales, there’s a bigger game. A 2020 report from consulting firm McKinsey & Co. predicts that 10% to 15% of all vehicles in the US fleet will be all-electric by 2030. While the cost of ownership will be 15% to 25% lower than future combustion models. Equally, there’s a lot of room to help fleets make the most of those benefits; McKinsey predicts a $15 billion annual market will form by 2030 solely in optimizing energy to power vehicle fleet charging. In response, automakers are scrambling to keep that part of the business.
Currently, Ford has a Ford Pro business serving fleet customers, and it was last year acquisition of Electripi, a technology company that helps businesses charge their fleets in a way that minimizes costs and meets renewable energy goals. GM’s BrightDrop unit is providing a fleet management platform based on the Ultium Charge 360 platform, connecting logistics services with charging expertise.
2020 Fiat Ducato
Stellantis’ Ram Commercial is also growing. The electric version of the Ram ProMaster due out next year will build on the existing lineup and will be closely related to the company’s electric cousin of the Fiat Ducato already sold in Europe. In preparation for the 2022 model year, Ram Commercial has added a new telecom module to its entire product line-up, regardless of propulsion system, to be future-proof for such services.
Dave Sowers, head of Ram Commercial, recently told us about some of the obstacles, why lighter last-mile delivery vans will be the first to electrify and why connected services are so especially important for electric trucks.
Customers of different fleets
“These customers (fleet) are more sophisticated; they really do the math on total cost of ownership — it’s acquisition minus disposal, it’s all the operating expenses in between, and they track it all very closely,” Sowers explains. “So any improvement in operating costs is huge.”
Sowers explains that customers are a bit worried about charging times, but they’re looking at the life cycles of most of these vehicles and it’s easy to guess.
2022 Ram ProMaster
Stellantis has software that will not only map out what customers need in terms of charging habits, but it will even help them determine the hardware — charging and actual van battery size — that they need for the mission.
“One of the challenges or downsides on the EV side is that the mass of the battery is taking away from the payload,” he explains, noting that the ProMaster with the petrol powertrain and 9,350 GVWR (weight rating) gross weight, often related to taxes) today have a tonnage rating of 4,680 lb. “To achieve the same GVWR in an EV, a very large battery is required and the load will be reduced.”
“If you size the battery incorrectly and use it too much, you will punish yourself for the amount of work you can do in a given day,” he sums up, noting that that is where the tools come in. This is very important.
Sowers says that while the fleet of light vans will quickly become electrified, it will be a while before we see specialized heavy-duty trucks, such as the ones we see on the road. maintenance wires or other industrial trucks, all electric. bulk. That’s because those trucks rely on hydraulics with increasingly difficult-to-define power needs — even when electric shut-off devices (ePTOs) are already available for such vehicles.
No circle of shame
Electric door-to-door delivery is all the more urgent for a particularly frustrating reason: It directly fixes what has become a circle of shame for last-mile deliveries — the plumes of black smoke left behind by Diesel deliveries to the vicinity repeated during the day.
“It’s a matter of corporate responsibility and corporate reputation… so they’re going to look at how we can be as intrusive in these neighborhoods, smart,” Sowers said. and emissions-wise,” he said.
It’s also a very obvious difference to notice.
