DHL scraps Ford electric delivery van
Deutsche Post-DHL will stop producing its electric delivery vehicle called StreetScooter, bringing to an end a much-hyped venture that was once seen as a possible disrupter to conventional van makers such as Volkswagen and Daimler.
The company had suffered “years of losses” from developing and producing the vehicle, chief financial officer Melanie Kreis said. Last year alone, the unit racked up a loss of about €100m.
Developed by a university project that Deutsche Post bought, StreetScooter became a surprise hit and beat German giants Daimler and VW to offering a battery-powered no-frills delivery vehicle, but didn’t manage to turn it into a sustainable business.
Deutsche Post had first sought to sell the unit and later looked for potential partners to help turn the electric-van maker into a profitable business and finance its expansion.
It also brought in Ford to help take the project global, with a larger variant based on the Ford Transit.
Most recently it had hired a former Tesla director to expand its sales network and had planned to set up production in China through a joint venture with local carmaker Chery Holding Group.
The company is now looking at potential payments it may have to make to partners for ending the project.
Booming online shopping and cities cracking down on exhaust emissions had initially increased the StreetScooter’s appeal amid growing interest in emission-free urban delivery, and Deutsche also sold the vehicle to retailers, fleet operators and banks.
From 2021, it will buy electric vans from other manufacturers.
Production will cease later this year and result in writedowns of between €300m and €400m, Ms Kreis said.
The company’s fleet now comprises about 11,000 Streetscooters, with several thousand to still be delivered this year.
Meanwhile, Hyundai’s hydrogen-powered 18-tonne trucks are set to hit the roads in Switzerland next month as the South Korean carmaker looks to establish a case for its zero-emissions technology in a low carbon world.
Invented nearly two centuries ago, hydrogen fuel cells first lost out to combustion engines and now trail electric batteries in the push for greener transport because they are expensive, hydrogen is hard to store, and most of it is extracted from natural gas in a process that produces carbon emissions.
But when it comes to trucks, Hyundai and its partners argue that electric batteries won’t always do the job because the bigger the payload, the bigger - and heavier - the battery, and that’s a problem for crawling up Swiss mountains.
And with more than half of Switzerland’s energy coming from hydropower, the country has the potential to extract “green” hydrogen from water with electrolysis, an energy-intensive but carbon-free process if powered by renewable electricity.
“It is not enough to produce a truck. You have to take care of the entire ecosystem, find like-minded partners and show this all makes sense for the customer,” said Mark Freymueller, chief executive of Hyundai Hydrogen Mobility.
Additional reporting: Bloomberg
