Freiburg is the latest test site for Dachser and its emission-free delivery as the company is set to roll out an all-electric fleet of Fuso eCanters, StreetScooters, and cargo bikes in the German city.
Dachser has designated post code 79098 for Freiburg’s city centre—including parts of the city’s Altstadt, Neuburg, and Oberau districts—an emission-free delivery area.
This means B2B and B2C customers in this roughly 1.5-square-kilometre zone can receive groupage shipments knowing they did something for the environment.
“We successfully introduced electrically assisted cargo bikes two years ago, so this is now the next logical step in doing our part to improve the quality of the air and of life in Freiburg’s downtown,” says Michael Gaudlitz, general manager of Dachser’s Freiburg logistics centre.
To make these emission-free deliveries, Dachser will deploy a 7.5-tonne all-electric FUSO eCanter, a light truck that will deliver goods either directly to customers or to the microhub operated by partner VeloCARRIER / Roc-Ket Cargo Bikes, located close to downtown.
From there, smaller shipments will be transferred to electrically assisted cargo bikes or StreetScooters for the delivery runs. The charge point for the electric truck is located at Dachser’s branch in the Breisgau industrial park south of Freiburg, which—like all the logistic provider’s branches in Germany—purchases 100 percent hydroelectric power.
Dachser’s collection and line-haul are performed with conventional diesel trucks, the company noted, but this new service would make significant cuts to the amount of emissions per shipment.
Electric vehicle mix for cities
Dachser has been testing the emission-free delivery concept in downtown Stuttgart since 2018, and Oslo was the most recent setting of this modular toolbox idea for city-centre deliveries.
“This is a promising beginning, but there is still a long road ahead of us—for a start, we have to resolve issues surrounding the availability of trucks with alternative powertrains,” explained Stefan Hohm, corporate director for corporate solutions, research & development, who is in charge of the City Distribution innovation project at Dachser.
At the same time, he remains optimistic. “Over the next two years, we will be examining select European metropolitan regions to successively identify the hotspots in their city centres and implement the DACHSER Emission-Free Delivery concept.”
