Royal Mail has started testing nine futuristic electric trucks from British manufacturer Arrival and will put 100 Peugeot electric vehicles into operation later this year.
The British postal group yesterday launched trials of three different versions of the Arrival trucks using them to transport packages between its mail and distribution centres around London. The Arrival trucks have a range of up to 100 miles when fully charged, and are designed for inner-city deliveries.
Paul Gatti, Royal Mail Fleet’s Managing Director, said: “Royal Mail is delighted to be collaborating with Arrival and pioneering the adoption of large electric commercial vehicles. We will be putting them through their paces over the next several months to see how they cope with the mail collection demands from our larger sites.
“We have trialled electric trucks before but not of this type of innovative design and look forward to see what additional benefits they can bring to our existing fleet of around 49,000 vehicles.”
Royal Mail signed an agreement with Peugeot last month to purchase 100 zero-emission Partner L2 Electric vans which will go into service at delivery offices around the UK from December 2017.
The postal operator had previously successfully trialled the vehicles. The Partner L2 Electric, launched in February this year, has a gross payload of 552kg and offers a range of up to 106 miles.
Commenting on the contract, Gatti stated: “Our research has shown that electric vans are a good operational fit with our business and we are delighted to be ordering such a large volume to use in our daily operations.
“Emissions are an important issue for us at Royal Mail and we are continuously looking at new and innovative ways to reduce our carbon footprint and our impact on air quality. Improving the efficiency of our fleet by introducing electric vans is just one example of this.”
