The ‘British milkman’ is going electric with 200 new electric vehicles from DHL

DHL, one of the largest logistics firms in the world, is building its own electric vehicles for its fleet, but is also now emerging as an EV supplier.

They announced today that U.K. home delivery business Milk & More has now placed an initial order of 200 electric vehicles from them.

Milk delivery is still fairly popular in the UK where “Milk & More makes more than 1.5 million deliveries to over 500,000 households each week”.

Now, they are going start making these deliveries with DHL’s electric Streetscooter vehicle.

Patrick Müller, Managing Director of Milk & More, commented:

“We wanted to make this unique tradition relevant again to the requirements of today’s customers. In order to do this, we need a local product portfolio, new IT systems as well as reliable, quiet and environmentally friendly vehicles. In the StreetScooter, we have found the ideal vehicle for our needs.”

While electric delivery vehicles are often limited to fairly short routes and don’t require that much range or energy capacity, the electric van platform used for the Streetscooter is built to fit a modular battery system that can hold modules between 30 and 90 kWh of energy, which they claim can enable a range of between 80 km (50 miles) and 200 km (124 miles).

They use battery modules made by BMW for their i3 electric vehicles.

Last year, DHL announced that Ford won an important contract to build 2,500 of the bigger version of the all-electric Streetscooter van for the logistics company.

Streetscooter is not DHL’s only electrification effort. The company is also buying electric trucks from Daimler and Tesla.