The Boring Old Box Truck Gets the Tesla Treatment

You can get a delivery truck—those boxy vans that companies ranging from FedEx Corp. to the local bakery use to shuttle goods from warehouses to homes and shops—for around $100,000. Lately, though, growing numbers of buyers are choosing to pay twice as much. The reason: The pricier ones are electric rather than diesel. And the cost of purchasing and operating the vehicle, after factoring in fuel savings, is fast approaching parity with traditional trucks. “The technology really works for this,” says BloombergNEF analyst Nikolas Soulopoulos. “And the economics work, or at least they’re starting to.”

The sweet spot for electric driving, it turns out, probably isn’t the passenger car, at least not yet. While batteries increasingly have sufficient range for road trips, recharging still takes much longer than filling the tank. And big 18-wheelers are too heavy and spend too many hours on the road to work with today’s EV technology. But for the middle ground—delivery vans, small buses and the like—those factors aren’t nearly as important. By 2030, BloombergNEF estimates, 15% of medium-duty trucks sold globally will be electric, more than 250,000 a year.