FedEx just received the first installment of special ordered electric trucks that are part of the logistics company’s goal of achieving net zero carbon emissions by 2040.
On Friday, BrightDrop, a division of General Motors (GM), delivered the first five of 500 electric light commercial vehicles to FedEx, which the company said are the fastest built vehicles in GM history from concept to market.
Earlier this year, FedEx announced it would be investing in sustainable energy initiatives which included replacing all of its parcel pickup and delivery trucks with zero-emission electric vehicles over the next two decades.
Now BrightDrop has helped FedEx inch closer to that pledge, with the delivery of five EV600 specialized electric vehicles that are powered by a Ultium battery platform with an estimated range of up to 250 miles on a single full charge. The vehicle can accommodate more than 600 cubic feet of cargo.
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In an interview with CNBC, BrightDrop CEO Travis Katz said, “we’ve designed these vehicles from the ground up to be delivery vehicles. We spent hundreds of hours in the field with real couriers.”
The first five EV600 vehicles were delivered to the FedEx Express facility in Inglewood, Calif. FedEx also plans on building charging infrastructure across its facilities nationwide, which includes 500 charging stations the company has already installed across California alone.
FedEx has said it will switch to buying only electric for 50 percent of it’s global pickup and delivery vehicles by 2025, and rise all the way to 100 percent by 2030.
That switch to electric could also lower costs for FedEx, with BrightDrop estimating the cost to charge an EV600 approximately 75 percent less than fueling a gas-powered truck.
“I think the message it sends is that sustainability is a core part of the business. It helps the businesses be more responsible, it meets our customers’ needs, it helps in our communities. And importantly, it’s a good play for the investment community as well,” said Mitch Jackson, FedEx chief sustainability officer, to CNBC.
However, Fedex isn’t the only logistics company getting into the market of electric vehicles. In 2019, former Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos said his company had ordered 100,000 electric delivery vehicles from Rivian Automotive in an effort to push the company’s delivery fleet to electric. By early 2021, Amazon announced that some of those custom electric delivery vehicles hit the road.
The U.S. Postal Service (USPS) is also attempting to go green, announcing in February this year that it had awarded a multi-billion dollar contract to Oshkosh Defense to manufacture a Next Generation Delivery Vehicle (NGDV) in an effort to modernize its fleet. According to USPS, that means building 50,000 to 165,000 NGDVs over the next 10 years that are either fuel-efficient or electric powered. They are estimated to appear on carrier routes in 2023.
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