Woolies home delivery fleet ripe for EV makeover

Grocery giant Woolworths’ trucks will take on a new shade of green as the company pledges to decommission the combustion engine vehicles in its home delivery fleet and replace them with electric vehicles by 2030.

Woolworths chief executive Brad Banducci hopes other companies will follow the retailer by moving to EVs, but noted the task of scaling up commercial electric fleets was no mean feat.

The company will launch 27 new electric vehicles onto the roads of Sydney in the coming months, the first stage of a broader plan to make its entire fleet 100 per cent electric-powered by 2030. According to Woolworths, the plan will help it hit its target of reducing transport emissions by 60 per cent and adding 1000 electric trucks to Australian roads.

The first vehicles will operate out of Woolworths’ Sydney-based customer fulfilment centres in Mascot and Caringbah, where the company has installed new charging stations in preparation.

Banducci said the company has been discussing the move to EVs for four years. Woolworths has operated two electric trucks in Australia over the past two years.

The 27 vehicles the retailer will launch this year are “still not very many”, he said. “It just shows you how far we [still] need to go as a country.”

The task of converting grocery delivery trucks to EVs is different to that of transitioning to electric cars. The vehicles need the power to make up to 20 deliveries in a shift and keep food chilled the entire time.

“You really get to see the challenges writ large when you try to scale it up,” Banducci said.