French postal service to buy thousands of electric vehicles

France's postal service plans to convert most of its 48,000-vehicle fleet to electric cars over the next few years, according to an article in the Wall St. Journal.

In late 2005, France's La Poste began a trial of eight experimental electric-powered mail-delivery vans in an effort to meet a government requirement to reduce pollution.

Not only did the vans work well and prove cheaper to operate than gasoline-powered ones, but the mailmen who drove them apparently reported higher job satisfaction. Now, La Poste is working on a five-year plan to replace the bulk of its vehicle fleet with electric cars.

"The car works great, with almost no maintenance," says Patrick Widloecher, La Poste's director for environmental affairs. "We're ready to order more."

The cars La Poste used were developed by Société de Véhicules Électriques (SVE), controlled by aerospace company Dassault, and were outfitted with a specially designed lithium-ion battery developed by a joint venture of Milwaukee car-parts maker Johnson Controls and French battery company Saft Groupe.

French car maker Renault SA, which tried and failed to roll out an electric van five years ago, says it wants to add such a vehicle to its lineup in 2010 as part of a wider partnership with affiliate Nissan Motor Co. of Japan.

SVE has yet to settle on a price for its electric car, and it isn't clear how much La Poste will have to pay to increase its fleet. But the car will be significantly more expensive than a traditional gasoline-powered vehicle because of the high cost of the lithium-ion battery, which La Poste says would account for about 60% of the unit price. The mail plans to save on operating expenses because charging the electric car with electricity costs about one-sixth what it would spend to fill up the tank with gasoline.

SVE plans to make only a few cars at first. The French company expects to begin volume production toward year end with the assembly of 1,000 vehicles and, from 2009, gradually ramp up
production to about 20,000 a year. That would be a fraction of the two million vehicles sold in France every year, though still more than all the other electric cars produced to date.

In France, which relies on nuclear and hydroelectric power for most of its electricity generation, electric cars would help achieve a drastic cut in greenhouse-gas emissions. In the U.S., about half of electricity is produced from coal and gasoline remains relatively cheap, so electric vehicles would have less of an immediate effect.

SVE Chief Financial Officer Sébastien Rembauville-Nicolle told the Journal he has no doubt about the performance of the Johnson Controls-Saft batteries. Because all the van prototypes undergoing tests are registered in SVE's name, he says, "the mailmen's speeding tickets end up in my mailbox."

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