Smith Electric Vehicles (SMTH)

[Joz]

FedEx is going electric


...High fuel prices can hurt any business. But few feel the pinch quite like FedEx Corp.
The logistics and delivery service owns 40,000 vans and trucks and burns through 300 million gallons of fuel per year, most of it diesel. A typical FedEx pickup and delivery truck logs 88 miles per day.

So FedEx is going electric.


...Delivery fleets are, in many ways, an ideal fit for electric vehicles.

The "range anxiety" that afflicts average drivers, who worry about running out of electricity on the open road, isn't a factor for delivery services. Companies such as FedEx and its rival United Parcel Service know the length of each of their daily routes. Their trucks return to the same facility each night, where they can recharge...



...The company has already tested electric trucks in Los Angeles for the past two years and anticipates no performance problems in the Bay Area's mild climate. But FedEx is also testing electric trucks - from multiple companies - in Chicago, seeing how the vehicles handle that city's harsh summers and brutal winters.

"We can do deployments in temperate climates, no problem," Sondhi said. "We want to test it in winter, because that's when you really see what you can get out of a battery."


http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2012/05/22/BU4V1OM0N2.DTL


Article includes other quotes relevant to three suppliers of electric trucks and vans; Smith, Navistar, and EVI.