UPS’s 50 seems very low for 2018 in comparison.
One article about them: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-03-24/even-germ... They are called StreetScooter https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/StreetScooter
Incidentally this city is also in the process of adopting a fleet of battery-electric transit buses, but it's been a very rough process for the same sorts of reasons - very large vehicles that run very long routes in this relatively far-flung city. The buses failure in testing to deliver the promised 270 mile range has been a major issue with them, as the roughly 200 they're able to do isn't sufficient to complete their planned schedule.
I also suspect that the routes are shorter than you might think, because there are a lot of stops and they are not moving all that fast for most of the trip. I suspect most UPS trucks probably average well under 25 miles per hour for most of their travel which would put an 8 hour day around 200 miles. In denser areas like cities it could be significantly less than that. If a truck makes a 1-minute stop to toss a package on your porch then drives half a mile in another minute and repeats, it's still only covering 15 miles and 30 packages an hour.
I wouldn't be surprised if UPS trucks within cities tended to be below 50 miles/day most of the time, and since they control driving routes very tightly they can easily put these trucks only on appropriate routes.
Saying they should just use Streetscooters is like telling a family of 5 to use a motorcycle.
That's my point exactly.
> The platform seems to be scalable and will be able to provide bigger hulls as well.
The platform won't scale up 5x to meet UPS's needs, it will require a new platform which is what UPS is piloting.
UPS’s 50 seems very low for 2018 in comparison.
If your company is constrained by (a), (b) or (c) current electric vans will make that limiting factor worse. Post offices are mostly constrained by (d) which makes it easier for them to deploy electric vehicles.
None of these problems are insurmountable, but current electric trucks aren't drop-in replacements for diesel trucks.