CEO Kathryn Schifferle weighs in on the “Electric Van Wars”
Excerpts taken from "The electric van wars are heating up", written by Peter Valdes-Dapena, CNN Business
Major automakers are coming out with electric cars and SUVs that could, one day, threaten Tesla's dominance in that field. But there's a big fight brewing in another electric vehicle market where Tesla doesn't even play. Electric work vans.
Electric vans present a big opportunity because of two concurrent trends. Demand for vans is increasing as Americans having gotten used to having stuff delivered to their homes and companies, including online retailers and automakers, are working to lower their carbon emissions.
Today the vast majority of work vans are powered by gasoline, but battery-powered vans could be ideally suited to this sort of use, giving companies more incentive to buy them. Work and delivery vans rarely make long interstate highway drives that would require recharging along the way. They generally drive relatively short routes and they return to company parking lots or garages at night where they can recharge for the next day's driving.
"When you look at the actual, already existing use cases for vans, you can see that electric adds to the value in a lot of different ways," said Kathryn Schifferle, CEO of Work Truck Solutions, a company that closely tracks truck and van purchases by businesses.
Market share of work vans, in general, has dropped in the last couple of years, according to J.D. Power, but that's mostly due to reduced inventories, said Tyson Jominy, vice president of data analytics at J.D.Power. Demand, however, has gone up a lot, according to Work Truck Solutions. The number of requests to dealers for vans has doubled over the past two years, according to the company.
