Germany's new EV player

There is a new battery-electric vehicle storming the roads of the most powerful important technical, development and innovation country in the car world.

And it’s not an Audi, BMW, Mercedes-Benz, Ford, Opel, Porsche or Volkswagen.

The German post office, Deutsche Post, investigated the electric commercial delivery vans on sale in its heartland and decided to do its own instead.

The logistics powerhouse is replacing its fleet of Volkswagen Caddy commercial vans with a simple go-it-alone van to keep up with e-commerce demand without adding to the airborne NOx saturation that has settled on most German city centres.

The van is called the StreetScooter and Deutsche Post is so happy with it, it’s considering whether to boost the manufacturing capacity to make it widely available outside its own fleets.

The move has caused enormous angst at Volkswagen, particularly, and could even threaten the rest Germany’s conventional commercial van makers, like Mercedes-Benz, Ford and Opel.

Deutsche Post puts the StreetScooter’s gestation and manufacture down to large steps forward in the power of design and development software (also empowering the likes of Google and Apple) that let it bring the vehicle into production without investing millions of euros in test centres and development drivers.

It insists it asked the traditional carmakers to supply it with electric vans, but they refused because Deutsche Post’s contract was too small. Now, the post office taps a huge network of traditional car industry suppliers to make its van, without building or designing a single part itself.

It used a €1000 software tool called PTC Windchill to link all of its 80-plus suppliers, ranging from powertrain supplier Bosch to lighting system specialist Hella, and has already built more than 1000 vans and has hinted it’s on its way to 5000 per year.

Designed to survive for 16 years, the vans were conceived to work 10 hours a day, six days a week, with fit and finish levels that are robust enough to open and close doors more than 200 times a day, but don’t approach passenger car levels of quality or comfort.

It has even shown a follow-up model, dubbed the StreetScooter Work L, which is larger and boasts a 1000kg payload and can carry eight cubic metres of cargo.