Future delivered.
The UK postal service, Royal Mail, has today revealed the latest addition to its fleet: the Arrival electric delivery van. Decked out in traditional red, the vans are being trialled with the cooperation of UK automaker Arrival, who are providing the Royal Mail with no less than nine units in three different flavours to test the feasibility, reliability, and possible potential that these vans might have in the future, as part of the logistic behemoth’s fleet of vehicles.
The vans themselves, in 3.5-, 6.0- and 7.0-tonne variants, are built in Banbury (about 60km out of London). Arrival claims it can build up to 50,000 annually, using nothing but artificial intelligence (AI) and robotics, which is hardly surprising given that the company is operated by Denis Sverdlov, a man making headlines for pushing Roborace, a driverless version of Formula E.
Owing to that connection, the fleet of vans in the Royal Mail’s care are actually fitted with all the hardware needed to enable fully-autonomous driving, or so the company claims. The system is, as far as we can tell, disabled due to legislation in the UK that currently restricts driverless vehicles, so Postman Pat will still have his job.
“Royal Mail is delighted to be collaborating with Arrival and pioneering the adoption of large electric commercial vehicles. We will be putting the through their paces over the next several months, to see how they cope with the mail collection demands from our larger sites. We have trialled electric truce before, but not of this type of innovative design. We look forward to see what additional benefits they can bring to our existing fleet of 50,000 vehicles.” — Paul Gatti, Managing Director, Royal Mail
The vans are being built in-house by Arrival at their Banbury facilities, adopting a modular design that utilises unique components and electronics, all exclusive to the Arrival brand. The platform means that an entire vehicle can be built in just 4-hours with the supervision of one person, while swapping out components takes as little as 15-minutes.
Forget the future of the mail service. This might be the future of motoring.
Stay tuned to CarShowroom for more information as we have it.
