Workhorse Fleet of Electric Delivery Trucks for UPS Cost Competitive with Conventional Trucks Without Subsidies

There is a lot of good news in the air for Workhorse*, the Ohio based company that manufactures plug-in hybrid electric trucks for commercial customers.  Over the past 12 months, UPS — which operated the largest fleet of alternative fuel vehicles in the world — has been evaluating a Workhouse delivery van to see whether it would be suitable for its fleet.  That experiment included tests of the HorseFly autonomous delivery drone that nestles in the top of a van and is used to deliver packages to remote locations while the truck continues along its route.

UPS has now taken delivery of 50 Workhorse vans, and while that is great news — the Workhorse van is up to 4 times more efficient than the diesel-powered vehicle it replaces and has far lower tailpipe emissions — the most important piece of the puzzle is that those 50 trucks have comparable acquisition costs to conventional vehicles without subsidies, according to a joint press release from Workhorse and UPS.  “Our goal is to make it easy for UPS and others to go electric by removing prior roadblocks to large scale acceptance such as cost,” says Workhorse CEO Steve Burns. 

Workhorse Fleet of Electric Delivery Trucks for UPS Cost Competitive with Conventional Trucks Without Subsidies