Battery electric vehicles like those from Tesla, Lucid and legacy brands like Ford and Mercedes-Benz may get all the attention from consumers, but decarbonizing commercial vehicles is going to have an important environmental impact. Ford, GM and others understand this which is why they are putting a lot of early emphasis on electrifying exactly those types of vehicles. GM delivered the first handful of Brightdrop electric delivery vans in late December and Ford has now started shipping the E-Transit.
Unlike the Brightdrop EV600 which was built from the ground up as an EV based on GM’s new Ultium battery and propulsion system, the Ford E-Transit is a conversion from the internal combustion models. The Transit is the best-selling full-size van in North America with almost 100,000 units delivered in 2021 even with chip constrained production.
While big vans like the Transit are great at hauling a lot of stuff they consume a lot of fuel in the process. Around town, 12-13 mpg is not uncommon and given the use case of many of these beasts of burden, it may be optimistic. Since fuel consumption is directly related to carbon emissions, this is a great market segment to focus on for electric vehicles. In many ways it’s also a simpler market for the automakers. While Transits are used for everything from package delivery to catering to plumbers and electricians, they rarely take long distance trips. They mostly stay relatively close to home and according to Ford’s telemetry data, they run an average of 76 miles per day. That should make the 126 mile range more than adequate for most users.
The E-Transit leverages a lot of hardware from the Mustang Mach-E including the power electronics module, rear motor and battery modules. While the E-Transit gets by with a smaller 68 kWh capacity than the Mach-E but uses the same modules in its pack.
Ford claims to have orders for more than 10,000 E-Transits in various body configurations from more than 300 fleet customers. The automaker isn’t saying how much production capacity it has for the battery-powered vans from its initial $100 million investment at the Kansas City Assembly Plant, but it is already planning to expand production.
The first truckloads of E-Transits are heading out to dealers across the U.S. starting this week and operators should be putting them to work soon. One of the big challenges that commercial operators face when replacing internal combustion vehicles with EVs is getting charging infrastructure in place to support those vehicles. Through its new Ford Pro business unit, Ford is providing support to its customers to design and deploy infrastructure and lump the cost into the vehicle financing.
