A range of just 80 km, a bright yellow design and a basic price of EUR 32,000 are not necessarily the right ingredients for a success story – and yet they have proved to be just that. Postal and courier service company Deutsche Post DHL (Bonn / Germany; www.dpdhl.com) has announced plans to expand the production of its economical short-distance electric vans at the Streetscooter subsidiary (Aachen / Germany; www.streetscooter.eu) it acquired in 2014.

Before the end of this year, a second assembly line is to be built near the present facility in Aachen, enabling capacity to be doubled to 20,000 electric delivery vans a year. The annual production of Streetscooter vehicles is to be divided in roughly equal parts between the models "Work" (with around 4 m³ load volume) and "Work L" (around 8 m³). In future, the vehicles will also be sold to third parties, but then with a choice of colours. The same applies to the company's e-bikes. Deutsche Post sees potential customers in local authorities, partner firms and fleet customers. At the beginning of 2018, Streetscooter intends to put another model on to the market with a load volume of around 20 m³.

The initiative is part of the Bonn-based postal group's recently announced plan to reduce all logistics-related emissions to zero, in net terms, by 2050. At present, the company has around 2,500 of these electric vehicles in service for letter and parcel deliveries throughout Germany. This figure is also expected to double during the course of this year.

The development of economically viable short-distance electric vehicles was the declared aim of Streetscooter, which was originally founded as a spin-off from RWTH Aachen University. Numerous German plastics companies participated in the project and supply parts to Aachen – including Dräxlmaier (Vilsbiburg; www.draexlmaier.com) and Hella (Lippstadt; www.hella.com), as well as Kirchhoff (Iserlohn; www.kirchhoff-gruppe.de), Rehau (Rehau; www.rehau.de) and Röchling (Mannheim; www.roechling.com).