E.ON study: Electric delivery vehicles could massively reduce CO2 emissions

According to a new calculation by the energy company E.ON, about 632,000 tons of CO2 could be saved annually in Germany if parcel services replaced their diesel transporters with electric vehicles and then powered them with green electricity. This would correspond to a saving of 0.4 percent of all greenhouse gas emissions from the transport sector in Germany. The study states that delivery services have made varying progress in electrifying their vehicle fleets.

It is well known that Deutsche Post DHL is a pioneer in this area, with more than 25,000 of its approximately 60,800 delivery vehicles in Germany already being electric. DPDHL had originally founded the Streetscooter brand to fill the gap in the manufacturer’s offerings. Nowadays, increasingly more mass-produced vehicles are being used, particularly from the manufacturer Ford and the E-Transit type, which initially served as the basis for the large Streetscooter Work XL.

Hermes is speeding up

Progress is being made at the Hamburg-based CEP logistics company Hermes, which currently has 770 electric vehicles on German roads. This is a significant size given the more than 10,000 daily delivery tours. GLS has about 650 electric delivery vans in operation, roughly ten percent of its entire fleet. The situation is less promising for the former electric pioneer UPS, which had early on relied on retrofit solutions from EFAS. Out of its more than 3,100 own transporters in Germany, only a hundred are purely electric. However, UPS is also a pioneer in the combined use of e-cargo bikes and micro depots, which saves many truck tours. DPD is finding it relatively difficult; the proportion of electric vehicles within its fleet is still in the single-digit percentage range but is continuously increasing.