UPS has announced the deployment of 167 Compressed Natural Gas (CNG) delivery vehiclesdemonstrating its commitment to sustainable business practices, while La Poste will acquire 500
electrical vehicles for its postal delivery fleet.The 167 new CNG trucks bring the UPS “green fleet” total to 1,629 vehicles. Previous CNGvehicles in UPS’s fleet were converted from gasoline and diesel vehicles in the 1980s to run onalternative fuels. The new vehicles are originally manufactured for alternative fuel use andidentical externally to the signature-brown trucks that now comprise the UPS fleet although theywill be marked as CNG vehicles. The trucks are expected to reduce emissions by 20% and improve fueleconomy by 10% compared to the cleanest diesel engines available today.
“UPS has deployed alternative fuel vehicles for more than 70 years and this CNG deployment isone more step towards the ‘greening’ of the UPS fleet,” said Robert Hall, UPS’s director of vehicleengineering. “Continuing to add CNG delivery trucks to our fleet is a sustainable choice becausenatural gas is a cost effective, clean-burning and readily available fuel.”
Meanwhile, La Poste announced the acquisition of 500 electrical vehicles to be included inits postal delivery fleet, with the aim of 10,000 vehicles of this type over the next five years.The company will have the first fleet of electrical vehicles within Europe and aims at diminishingits greenhouse gas emissions of 15% by 2012. Furthermore La Poste intends to acquire 300 electricalquads at the beginning of 2009 and 3,000 before 2012 for postal delivery in different cities andregions of France.
According to La Poste, the use of electrical vehicles allows the operator to save threetonnes of CO2 a year and by vehicle, in comparison with a traditional car. The acquisition of the500 vehicles will thus allow La Poste to make an annual reduction of 1,500 tonnes of CO2.
