Through an agreement with Chanje Energy, FedEx (NYSE: FDX) plans to electrify 42 stations in California, making it one of the largest deployments of charging infrastructure by a single commercial fleet to date.
“We believe this will be a game-changer,” said Mitch Jackson, FedEx chief sustainability officer, in a press statement.
The agreement marks a new phase in the company’s ambitious electric vehicle plan, announced in 2018.
As part of that initiative, FedEx said would order 1,000 Chanje V8100 electric delivery vehicles. The company started construction on electronic DC (direct current) charging stations in January 2020.
The logistics giant is purchasing 100 of the vehicles from Chanje and leasing 900 from Ryder System.
The new infrastructure will support those vehicles, Jackson said in the statement.
It will “not only help FedEx meet our operational efficiency and sustainability goals,” he said, “but provide learning, scaling and experience to others in the vehicle electrification journey.”
Chanje Energy will begin production of the EVs later this year, in Hangzhou, China. The vehicles will be delivered over the next year, and Ryder will provide maintenance and distribution support.
The FedEx partnership comes as fellow logistics giants Amazon and UPS are ramping up electric vehicle orders. In September 2019 Amazon announced the purchase of 100,000 Rivian electric vehicles. In January 2020, UPS ordered 10,000 Arrival electric delivery vans for Europe and North America.
