ColognE-mobil Project Cites Electric Vehicles Have Potential For Urban Business Use

Since April 2010, ColognE-mobil – jointly sponsored by the German city of Cologne, RheinEnergie AG, the University of Duisburg-Essen, and Ford Motor Company – has been testing a fleet of ten Ford Transit BEVs and ten Ford Transit Connect Electrics under real-life conditions in urban areas of Cologne run by several fleet customers in the delivery and service sector. Later this year an additional five Focus Electrics will join the test fleet.

The testing so far has encompassed 31,000 miles of real-world driving, involving the usual day-to-day duties of commercial vehicles, such as carrying cargo and making deliveries in normal urban road conditions. It has also involved approximately 1,500 charges. The interim findings include:

The performance of the Transit BEV and Transit Connect Electric indicates that pure electric commercial vehicles are well suited for distribution, service, and delivery in cities.
Customers participating in the test typically drove between twenty-five and seventy kilometers per day, with the highest daily average in the fleet averaging about 100km, well within the maximum range of one-hundred sixty-five kilometers for the Transit BEV and one-hundred thirty kilometers for the Transit Connect Electric.
Approximately 1,500 charging processes have been completed so far without issue. Most of this charging activity has taken place across the twelve facilities RheinEnergie installed at the work yards of the participating companies. Additionally, the public charging station installed in Cologne city center has been used more than 500 times.
The average driving distance between two charging processes was thirty kilometers, highlighting that the widely discussed "range anxiety" may not be such an issue for typical urban usage.
The electric vehicles used in the colognE-mobile project – charged with renewable energy – provided a comparative ninety percent reduction on carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions on well-to-wheel emissions.

"The colognE-mobil project provides essential data and important feedback from fleet customers on our electric vehicles. While the results are overwhelmingly positive so far, they are still invaluable in helping us and our project partners to enhance ongoing development of e-mobility solutions," said Roland Krüger, Ford of Europe Project Manager for colognE-mobil.

The zero-emission, pure electric-powered version of the Transit Connect light commercial vehicle is on sale in European markets following its successful launch in North America in December 2010. 'Glider' units - complete vehicles except for the powertrain - will be shipped from the Ford Otosan manufacturing facility in Kocaeli, Turkey, directly to an Azure-contracted manufacturing location in the UK for final assembly.

The completed Transit Connect Electric van then will be sold by Azure Dynamics through a specially-created network of dealerships. The European Transit Connect Electric will be labeled with both the Ford Blue Oval and Azure's Force Drive logo, like its North American sibling.

The University of Duisburg-Essen also conducted a computer simulation on the effects and possibilities of using electric powered passenger cars in the Cologne area. Creating a virtual fleet of 30,000 electric cars, the consumption of electricity reached just 3.7 percent of the total comparative electricity demand of households in the area. With the average daily driving distance of a typical Cologne resident being 30km, the given range of electric cars is also suitable for everyday use, too.