Australia Post has added twenty electric trucks to its fleet in the lead up to Christmas, in a bid to move into carbon-neutral deliveries.
Australia Post already operates 3,500 electric vehicles — with 2,100 e-trikes and 1,400 electric bicycles — making them the largest EV operator in the country.
“Up until this point, our electric fleet has consisted solely of smaller delivery vehicles that are used for the last mile,” said general manager network James Dixon.
“We’ve trialled a range of electric trucks but the Fuso eCanter [pictures below] is the first we’ve found that suits both Australian conditions and our unique operational needs.
“The payload on these trucks is three-and-a-half tonnes, the trucks weigh about 7.5 tonnes and do about 130 kilometres between recharges. They will run out of our major parcel facilities and go back and forth collecting pallets of freight from our customers.
“Today you couldn’t go Sydney or Melbourne with an electric truck but as hydrogen technologies improve and hydrogen fuel cells are placed in trucks, we think that five to six years from now we’ll be running trucks between Melbourne, Sydney with hydrogen fuel cell technology,” Mr Dixon said.
Despite a backlog in parcels, industrial strikes, and increased pressure with the past weekend’s Black Friday and Cyber Monday sales, AusPost say it is in a good place.
“The business is booming at the moment – we would have done more than 2 million parcel deliveries [on Friday] and this week we expect to reach around 3 million a day due to the Black Friday sales,” Dixon notes.
“So the volume is definitely coming through the system, compared to around 1.5 million a day pre-COVID.”
