La Poste Puts Electric Car to Work
The French postal service (La Poste) has ordered up 10,000 electric delivery vehicles.
La Poste will phase in the electric vehicles over a five year period and will get their first shipment of 500 in 2008. They've been testing eight electric models in Paris and in Bordeaux since 2005 (which must have gone really well considering the order). Manufacturers expected to bid on the request include French transport groups SVE and Bollore.
There's no word as to how many of the 60,000 non-electric vehicles in the French fleet will be replaced, but government officials are hoping the prominent visibility of these new delivery vehicles will encourage the public to begin to phase out their dirty modes of transport as well.
Although they're going to have to work a little harder if they want to catch up to the United States Postal Service. The USPS already has 37,000 alternative fuel vehicles and they're continually conducting research on new ways to make delivery state-side more enviro-friendly. Afterall, the mail must go through. "Neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night" … nor global warming!
Via WBCSD
Tags: electric car, electric vehicle, Environment, France, La Poste, mail, National and World News, Paris, USPS
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April 26th, 2007 at 3:31 pm
I don’t know why otherwise seemingly intelligent being think that electric cars are clean. Perhaps for the same reasons they think that the wind being free will make wind power anything other than the exorbitantly expensive, insignificant and unreliable power source that it actually is.
An electric car mostly simply moves the emissions to another place. Actually, with the advent of practical carbon sequestration technologies like Alsom’s chilled ammonia techniques, reduction of carbon via other means, like electric cars, is a rather pointless endeavor from an environmental perspective. However, when practical batteries are developed so that the costs of batteries are not 4 times the cost of gasoline, as they are today on
a per mile basis, electric cars will be more efficient and allow the destruction of the crude market, which currently is capitalizing terrorist regimes like Iran’s and Arab organizations. France was stupid to buy all-electric vehicles, which wouldn’t lead anyone to buy one unless thay never travel more than a few miles from home, an unlikely scenario. They should have waited for plug-in hybrids - they are close to commercialization and are a far more practical and intelligent way to reduce emissions, should you still feel the urge to be a hometown environmental hero to the gullible and ignorant.
April 26th, 2007 at 3:41 pm
If France is really silly enough to believe that they can foster an impractical, range bound vehicle on the general public by staffing their
letter carriers with them, the French gov is even less intelligent than normal, which is scary.
They also are foolish in tossing away many perfectly good existing vehicles. Do they really expect them not to be used and continue to generate emissions, or are they going to make what would be a public relations nightmare and send them all to the crusher? If they had any sense, they would have phased in the electrics as the fleet naturally recycles itself. This operation has all the earmarks of a youthfull and foolish
hand in the mix. I can demonstrate the pitifully small gains in emission reduction by this mass slaughter of worthwhile vehicles. This action is a scandal in the making if the French media knows enough about emission mathematics to point out the stupidity of the whole scheme. Another perfect example of bonehead government actions by govies wasting the money of others in an attempt to gain political capital. Only in France.
April 27th, 2007 at 5:30 pm
Gee, the trolls are quick! Well, it depends on the EV chosen, doesn’t it? Two years of evaluation, and as the poster said, the size of the order indicates a successful test.
France’s electricity is mostly nuclear, which, while it has its own problems, has little carbon footprint. And the grid is the future. When coal and oil, by necessity, go offline, the grid will still be there and it will have to be fed something. At that point there will be little alternative to electric transportation.* The more of it that is reliable and accessible mass transit, the better our overall chances. And Europe’s increasing expertise and investment in wind, solar, tidal and wave power seems to me wiser than the US’s stomping around in Iraq strong-arming the locals for oil contracts to feed our SUVs.
I use 100 percent wind, and it’s cost competitive even here in the NW (where we’re mostly hydro) and not killing a lot of birds, either. What’s the beef?
*Clue: Trolls start with the “long tailpipe.” From there the usually go on to hydrogen (long, long way off), sequestration (not proven yet), cap and trade instead of a carbon tax (a scheme to enrich the rich mostly), and crop-based ethanol (burning our food in cars).