UPS plans to collaborate with Workhorse to develop an electric delivery truck that will be comparable in acquisition cost to legacy ICE trucks without any subsidies, an industry first.

Each Class 5 truck will have a range of approximately 100 miles, quite sufficient for delivery routes in and around cities.

UPS will test 50 of the vehicles in several cities across the country, including Atlanta, Dallas and Los Angeles. Following real-world test deployments, UPS and Workhorse will fine-tune the design and begin rolling out a larger fleet in 2019. UPS has approximately 35,000 diesel or gas trucks in its fleet that are comparable in size and duty cycle to the new EVs.

UPS expects the operating cost of its new e-truck to be less than that of a similarly equipped legacy vehicle. The new trucks will join over 9,000 alternative fuel vehicles already in the UPS fleet. The company has set a goal that one in four new vehicles purchased by 2020 will be “an alternative fuel or advanced technology vehicle.”

“Electric vehicle technology is rapidly improving with battery, charging and smart grid advances that allow us to specify our delivery vehicles to eliminate emissions, noise and dependence on diesel and gasoline,” said Carlton Rose, President, Global Fleet Maintenance and Engineering for UPS. “With our scale and real-world duty cycles, these new electric trucks will be a quantum leap forward for the purpose-built UPS delivery fleet.”

“This innovation is the result of Workhorse working closely with UPS over the last 4 years refining our electric vehicles with hard-fought lessons from millions of road miles and thousands of packages delivered,” said Steve Burns, CEO of Workhorse Group. “Our goal is to make it easy for UPS and others to go electric by removing prior roadblocks to large scale acceptance such as cost.”

Source: UPS