The shift to e-vehicles confronts fleet operators with major challenges, above all high investment costs. For this reason, an international consortium around AIT and DLR has recently launched the research project EUFAL, standing for Electric Urban Freight and Logistics. The project aims at providing a platform of exchange as a decision support system for those operators. The platform includes tools and advice for companies at different stages of Electric Vehicle (EV) implementation, being the early planning of EV use, the implementation of EV use, and the optimization of the EV implementation.
The challenges of EV implementation in commercial fleets
Although it is commonly believed that EVs are suited to perform last mile deliveries especially in urban areas, only some companies make use of electric delivery vehicles. Up to now, electric vehicles have been considered as perfect substitutes of conventional vehicles, but the aligned problems still need to be solved: difficulties to deal with the inter-day variability of tour-lengths, problems to integrate EVs into existing fleets and working forces and missing own and reported experiences. However, the potential for EVs is much larger. In order to achieve this, logistics concepts and the usage of EVs have to be optimized jointly, taking the particularities of different spatial areas into account. EVs, integrated into mixed fleets, could be used in urban areas, while traditional vehicles could operate in surrounding areas. Alternatively, the use of micro-distribution centres in connection with urban distribution could be imagined.
Jürgen Zajicek, Research Engineer at the AIT Center for Mobility Systems: “EUFAL will support companies with information for their EV implementations at the best level possible. The aim is to have demonstrations of commercial EV fleets including all kinds of company owned cars at different stages of development. Learnings from the EV implementations and the integration of sharing solutions will help to improve the platform and provide the needed knowledge to future users to promote electric commercial transport.”
Read an article about EUFAL at derstandard.at (in German):
Auf dem Weg zur elektrisch betriebenen Nutzfahrzeugflotte