Asda has been making progress on its ongoing UK electric vehicle fleet rollout as it aims to completely remove diesel vehicles from its grocery home delivery service by 2028.
Home deliveries from Asda’s Gillingham Pier, Old Kent Road and Sheffield Chaucer stores will all be carried out by electric vehicles, as part of the retailer’s wider strategy to halve its greenhouse gas emissions by 2030.
The supermarket estimates that the vehicles, which can run up to 120 miles per charge with seven hours of charging time needed, will save over 400,000 kilograms of carbon dioxide per year.
The new vehicles will supply over 345,000 households in the area, with the service soon to be rolled out to more customers in Cardiff Bay and Leith as Asda commits to servicing two more stores with a fully electric fleet by the end of the year.
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“Using electric rather than diesel delivery vehicles will lead to huge reductions in our emissions and go a long way to achieve our goals of halving our greenhouse emissions by 2030 and becoming carbon net zero by 2040,” said Asda senior vice president of ecommerce Simon Gregg.
“We are really excited that we are now able to make all deliveries form three stores entirely electric and we’ll be closely monitoring performance of the vans to learn and evolve our approach for future.”
It follows a wave of announcements from fellow supermarkets about switching to electric vehicles – with Waitrose unveiling plans to transition its entire home delivery fleet to electric vehicles, Sainsbury’s introducing fully electric fleet in 2021, and Tesco which became the first retailer to launch a zero emission lorry.
However, the ECIU (Energy and Climate Intelligence Unit) last week warned that failure to expand zero emissions vehicles further across the consumer market could lead to the UK missing its net zero targets.
