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Full shift to electric vans would melt Royal Mail's London hub, MPs told

rh587

This all seems a bit suspect. Okay, so you don't have a connection for full EV conversion. That doesn't preclude partial transitioning. I don't know if Royal Mail have to pay the Congestion Charge but a Renault Kangoo EE is not that much more expensive than the petrol version these days and the monthly battery hire is easily covered by avoiding the CC for London Operators, as well as the reduced servicing costs.

Likewise my local Sorting Office is on the edge of town, right next to an electrified main line. There's no shortage of power infrastructure in the area one way or another, and there is space for extra sub-station capacity if needs be. Given that we're a mid-sized county town, it seems a reasonable proposition that in the short term you could be introducing EVs to urban routes and retaining petrol/hybrid for rural routes.

I notice they're trialling a UK startup's 4-tonners. That's well and good for that mid-range segment between local delivery and HGV classes, it doesn't explain the lack of Kangoo-class vehicles coming in to replace the older vehicles in the Transit-Connect fleet. Had they lasted a bit longer they could have bought out Modec in the same way that Deutsche Post bought StreetScooter, or at least become a long-term partner - Modec only ever made about 400 vehicles. An RM order for ~20,000 over 5-10 years would have allowed them to scale production, cut costs and carve out a market for themselves, especially now Li-Ion battery costs are tumbling.

If the UK can't go full-electric because of grid-capacity concerns, it seems like the most obvious priorities for conversion are taxis, local delivery vehicles and buses - urban-centric, short journeys with high idle-times and start-stop cycles in traffic and at junctions.

IC Engines are at their most efficient when hot, doing a steady speed (i.e. motorways), so we don't care about the long-haul motorway warriors. There is no reason why the likes of Royal Mail should be fouling up urban air quality with slow moving start-stop cycles that clock less than 50-70miles/day.

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