Deutsche Post electric truck boom

While Germany’s biggest and best car makers have spent years and billions of euros moving their chess pieces into place for their electric-car assaults, a surprising upstart is making the game look easy.

Germany’s Deutsche Post DHL dumped the commercial vans of Mercedes-Benz and Volkswagen in favour of building its own simple, cheap-to-engineer battery-electric vans.

The Shanghai motor show might be flooded with electric concept and production cars, but Deutsche Post DHL’s StreetScooter vans are working so well it had to double production from 10,000 vans to 20,000 – and find another production site.

"The large demand for the StreetScooter and our own ambitious climate-protection goals have encouraged us to further expand our commitment in the area of electro-mobility and to also make our expertise available to others," Deutsche Post board member Juergen Gerdes said.

Designed quickly and cheaply as a key part of a low-emission end parcel delivery system for online shopping, it is now taking orders to sell 10,000 of its StreetScooters to other companies. It’s even working on a plan to move StreetScooter volumes to 100,000 cars a year (more than Tesla’s production), spread across 10 German factories, each with a 10,000-unit capacity.

With no tradition of vehicle or electrical engineering, Deutsche Post DHL designed and built the StreetScooter itself because no German carmaker would do it for them, which made Volkswagen Group head Matthias Meuller “annoyed beyond measure”.

The plan includes using its own network of 400 garages across Germany to maintain the vans and selling them directly to anybody who calls their local post office.

With 2500 StreetScooters already plying their trade on German streets, the company is planning to sell them for €32,000.