Most of Our Work Is Too Far for an Electric Van. We’ve Taken One Anyway
Most of Our Work Is Too Far for an Electric Van. We’ve Taken One Anyway.
Most of Our Work Is Too Far for an Electric Van. We’ve Taken One Anyway.
This week a fully electric Renault Master joined us on trial. We should say the awkward part first: the majority of the work we do exceeds what this vehicle can cover on a single charge. We knew that before it arrived. We took it anyway.
That isn’t a contradiction. It’s the point.
What we’re actually trying to find out:
The question isn’t “can an electric van do everything we do?” We already know the answer to that. The question is which slice of our work it can do better than a diesel — and whether that slice is big enough to build on.
So over the coming weeks we’re measuring the things that decide it:
- What kind of work suits it, and what job distances are realistic once you account for a real load, real traffic and a real driving day
- Where the rapid chargers on our primary routes actually are, whether a van this size physically fits the bay, and whether they’re working when we get there, and whether there are queues to deal with?
- How much energy we use per mile, and how that changes as the load gets heavier
- What the day feels like from the driver’s seat, which is a different question from what the numbers say
Charging has to fit the driver, not the other way round.
The temptation with an electric van is to plan the route and then find somewhere to charge. That’s backwards, and it costs you the day.
We’re doing it the other way: identifying the high-speed chargers on our main corridors, setting drivers up with accounts on all of them before they need them, and then building routes so the charge stop lands where the driver’s break was going to be anyway. Done properly, the charging time costs nothing — the van fills up while the driver eats. Done badly, you’ve added forty minutes to a job for no reason.
Customer ETAs will be different, and we’d rather absorb that cost than pass it on. An honest ETA on an electric job has to include charge dwell time. That arithmetic is new to us, and getting it wrong means telling a customer 2pm and arriving at 2:40. So we’re working that out on jobs where we control the risk, and every trial job has a conventional vehicle as a fallback. No customer’s delivery is an experiment.
Where this is really heading Two things this trial is quietly building towards. The first is heavier vehicles. Our trial van is a standard 3.5 tonne. Realistically, our future is in the 4 tonne class, where a category B licence now covers zero-emission vehicles up to 4.25 tonnes and the old restrictions on distance from base have been lifted. We can’t gather 4 tonne data from a 3.5 tonne van — but if we log energy use against payload carefully enough, we can build a defensible model of what a heavier vehicle would do, and then test that prediction when we get one. We’d rather forecast from our own numbers than from a brochure.
The second is temperature control, which is a significant part of what we do. We have deliberately not started with a refrigerated electric van. The hard parts of running an EV in this business aren’t the fridge — they’re the charging, the routing, the ETAs and the driver habits. We’re solving those on a simpler vehicle first, so that when we do put a temperature-critical load into an electric van, none of it is new.
We’ll publish what goes wrong too. Some of this trial will not work. A charger will be broken or blocked. A route will turn out to be twenty miles too long. A driver will finish a day less confident than they started it. Those are the useful results, and we’ll write them up as honestly as the good ones.
Thirty years of moving freight out of Kent has taught us that the operators worth trusting are the ones who tell you what didn’t work. We’ll report back. 01227 773 030