EW Looks at 2023 EV Cargo Vans & Delivery Trucks

June 16, 2023
The newest electric vans and trucks have surprisingly good range and may be an interesting option the next time you need to add energy-efficient vehicles to your delivery fleet.

If you are in the market for an EV cargo van or EV delivery truck, you may be surprised at the longer mileage ranges now available since Electrical Wholesaling last gathered information on EV-powered delivery vehicles in Oct. 2021, and at the availability of several electrically powered box trucks.

Most of the EV cargo vans on the market have a range of up to 150 miles, and at least one, the Mercedez-Benz e-Sprinter, has a driving range of up to 300 miles before needing to be recharged, depending on the size of their battery. The 150-mile range should be plenty for most distributors and will allow them to charge the vehicles at night with their own EV charging stations at their branch locations. With this sort of range, there's less need to worry about drivers spending time recharging their vans at public charging stations while out making deliveries.

While the EV delivery vans built by Ford, General Motors, Mercedez-Benz and Rivian (exclusively for Amazon) have been around for a while, you may be unfamiliar with some of the other manufacturers, like Green Power Motor Co., Canoo and Arrival. WalMart signed a contract with Canoo to build 4,500 lighter-duty vans, and UPS plans to buy 10,000 EV vans from Arrival.

Because of all the new players and new technology in this part of the EV market, EW's editors plan to make this review of EV-powered delivery vehicles an annual digital feature. Things get a little confusing when collecting specification data on some of the newer companies, because their websites can be heavy on renderings of concept vehicles and instructions on how to put down a deposit on a vehicle when it eventually rolls off the production line, and a little light on actual performance metrics. Hopefully, these EW articles will help you clear a path through this thicket.

About the Author

Jim Lucy | Editor-in-Chief of Electrical Wholesaling and Electrical Marketing

Jim Lucy has been wandering through the electrical market for more than 40 years, most of the time as an editor for Electrical Wholesaling and Electrical Marketing newsletter, and as a contributing writer for EC&M magazine During that time he and the editorial team for the publications have won numerous national awards for their coverage of the electrical business. He showed an early interest in electricity, when as a youth he had an idea for a hot dog cooker. Unfortunately, the first crude prototype malfunctioned and the arc nearly blew him out of his parents' basement.

Before becoming an editor for Electrical Wholesaling  and Electrical Marketing, he earned a BA degree in journalism and a MA in communications from Glassboro State College, Glassboro, NJ., which is formerly best known as the site of the 1967 summit meeting between President Lyndon Johnson and Russian Premier Aleksei Nikolayevich Kosygin, and now best known as the New Jersey state college that changed its name in 1992 to Rowan University because of a generous $100 million donation by N.J. zillionaire industrialist Henry Rowan. Jim is a Brooklyn-born Jersey Guy happily transplanted with his wife and three sons in the fertile plains of Kansas for the past 30 years. 

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