27 July 2017
Ford’s London-based trial of plug-in hybrid Transit Custom vans will get underway in a matter of weeks.
The manufacturer announced plans to set to work 20 examples of its best-selling, one-tonne LCV – complete with a mix of internal combustion engines and plug-in electric power – in January this year. The trial is due to commence in the final quarter of 2017, when a variety of public and private sector businesses will adopt the vans onto their fleets.
The project will be run in partnership with Transport for London (TfL) and the government-funded Advanced Propulsion Centre (APC), with the latter organisation providing funding in the form of a £4.7m grant.
Speaking to Transport News Brief, Mark Harvey, Ford’s recently-appointed Director of Urban Electric Van Programmes, explains the basics of the scheme. “It’s a year-long trial and 20 vans will be participating,” he said. “We have named some of the fleets already; some of the vehicles will be with TfL, as they’re the key partner, the Metropolitan Police will have a couple and the rest will be with commercial fleets [including] Clancy Plant, British Gas and Addison Lee for their courier work. We have ongoing discussions with a number of other fleets and we’ll be announcing them later in the year.”
TfL is to run three vans as part of the trial, which will be used for freight duties, while the Met’s pair of Custom PHEVs will be used for very different purposes: one as a liveried, second response vehicle to traffic accidents, the other an unmarked forensic support unit.
Though plug-in hybrid vehicles use both a petrol or diesel engine and battery-powered electric motor, the idea is that the Transits run on electricity most of the time, as Ford claims the project aims to address the capital’s air quality issues. It also wants to gather information about the way in which businesses operating in urban environments use plug-in hybrids.
Harvey said, “The strong feedback we got from those fleets was that a number of them were already using battery electric vehicles – with very mixed experiences, it’s fair to say. A lot of them were not happy with some of the ranges they were seeing in the real world, versus the quoted figures, and they had some acceptance struggles from their employees who used them, given the inconveniences that they created, and the range anxiety. A lot of them were really looking for the flexibility and the elimination of range anxiety that a plug-in hybrid brings.”
As well as establishing exactly how the vans will be used by fleets day-to-day, the project will also give businesses and public sector organisations a flavour of what it’s like to live and work with plug-in LCVs.
“It’s really giving [operators] the understanding of how they could make an electrified product work in their operation,” said Harvey. “There’s huge pressure on a number of them – as public organisations and as commercials – to be going towards electric vehicles. A lot of tenders are specifying it for future work, for example, so they’ve got strong pressure to get electric vehicles into their fleet.”
“A number of them are a long way down that journey already and have a lot of experience. Others less so; they have a lot of pre-conceived barriers to adopting electric vehicles, and they want to use the trial to see if some of those barriers are real, how they can integrate [the vehicles] into their existing operations and mange some of the challenges they present. We’re supporting that with a telematics system, which will be getting lots of real-time data off the vehicles, to understand how they’re being operated, how their being used and what benefit they should bring to those organisations.”
Ford is hoping to soak up a heap of information throughout the trial, including details on the vans’ environmental and financial performance, along with any golden nuggets about how companies can use plug-in hybrid LCVs to their advantage. It recently announced the opening of a smart mobility innovation office in Here East, the former media centre for the 2012 Olympics, where some of the data processing from the trial will take place.
Harvey explained, “We need to get [the vans] racked and pre-prepped to the requirements of the fleets before getting out on the road and gathering data and real miles of usage [but when the trial commences] we will have a huge amount of real world leanings around both the vehicle, potential services that could compliment it, vehicle use cases and [information about] how the vehicle is operating in the city. As part of the announcement of the trial and the product, we explained our intention to put it into mass production in 2019.
“All those leanings will help us to ensure we understand who the vehicle is best-suited to, because clearly, a plug-in hybrid is not the solution for everyone. If you’re running between, say, London and Birmingham or London and Manchester every day, then a stage six diesel is by far and away a better solution, but for an urban environment, [a plug-in hybrid] a very good solution. We’ll hopefully have the data to back that up, and we’ll be using it to educate people as we move towards the mass-production product.”
The Transit Custom PHEV trial is one element of a big push towards electric commercial vehicles on Ford’s part. When it announced plans for the experiment at the start of the year, it also revealed its intentions to electrify an increasing number of its biggest-selling commercial vehicles, and said it would release 13 new EV products during the next five years.
