Asda is now fulfilling home deliveries from three of its stores solely using EVs, supporting plans to completely remove diesel vehicles from its grocery home delivery fleet by 2028.
Groceries from its Gillingham Pier, Old Kent Road and Sheffield Chaucer stores are being delivered by a fully electric fleet, providing more than 345,000 households in the store catchment areas with access to a greener delivery choice.
Its Cardiff Bay and Leith stores will also switch exclusively to electric vehicles by the end of the year.
The new vehicles are a combination of Maxus eDeliver 9 and Ford E-Transit eLCVs, which are already saving 400 tonnes of CO2 per year. Once the Leith and Cardiff Bay eLCVs have gone live, Asda will have 44 electric delivery vehicles across its fleet.
The supermarket giant’s plans to go fully electric on its grocery home delivery fleet by 2028 are part of its wider strategy to halve its greenhouse gas emissions by 2030 as part of its Courtauld commitments.
Simon Gregg, Asda senior vice president of e-commerce, said: “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 gas emissions by 2030 and becoming carbon net zero by 2040.
“We are really excited that we are now able to make all deliveries from three stores entirely electric and we’ll be closely monitoring performance of the vans to learn and evolve our approach for future.”
Asda has also started trials of self-driving vehicles for home deliveries in partnership with Wayve. Said to be the UK’s largest autonomous grocery home shopping delivery trial, the year-long project was announced this spring and enables the supermarket to autonomously deliver groceries to a catchment area of over 170,000 residents across 72,000 households in London.
The Wayve self-driving vehicles have joined Asda’s existing online delivery operation at the Park Royal superstore in West London and have the capability to drive themselves to customers’ homes.
