[LordHeini]

No the vehicle has to fit their specs which are rather specific. Some specs are seemingly "low tec" in some areas but not in others. For example range:a lot of routes do not exceed 50 km but standard manufacturers cramp as much range as possible into their vehicles thus driving the weight and price up. A delivery vehicle like this does not need the range but good luck telling that your average car manufacturer who also has to think about other customers (who usually care a lot about range).

Then the vehicle has a hight floor making it back friendly for the delivery person which is something unwanted in your average delivery truck. It limits the height of the goods you can transport but the Post does not deliver packages that huge.

This is a special vehicle for a certain purpose and no commerial manufacturer had interest in developing something like this.

[jacquesm]

Sounds like an excellent opportunity for a customization of an existing vehicle.

[anentropic]

not if existing vehicle is already more expensive than it needs to be, due to meeting non-requirements for DHL

[jacquesm]

They're charging 32000 euros for those things, that's a lot of budget to work with.

[skriticos2]

economics 101: they are selling them to third parties for that price (including some profit and negotiation margin). So they likely pay somewhere around 20-25k for internal use. That's ridiculously cheap for this kind of purpose built vessle.

[r00fus]

Based on this report of what the USPS is asking to replace an ages-old design mail truck [1] ($30k per), EUR 25k sounds pretty dang good for a purpose built small-run pure-electric vehicle. I'd bet they could easily get the costs down to 15K EUR with appropriate volumes.

Maintenance costs on electric vehicles are a lot less, and obviously they don't use fuel, so that costs less too.

[1] http://voices.washingtonpost.com/federal-eye/2010/06/broken_...

[blacksmith_tb]

They don't use fossil fuels, but they do need to be charged, and a fleet of them would need some added infrastructure to charge simultaneously. But that's a one-time cost, in the long run they should be cheaper to operate, clearly.

[allengeorge]

For an already customized version. Once you start by buying a stock electric vehicle you've already blown a large chunk of your budget.

[jacquesm]

http://business.citroen.nl/bedrijfswagens/citroen-berlingo-e...

Which leaves 8K to do the customization and would not require the capital investment, on top of that they would have a much higher resale value when no longer needed.

[josefx]

The largest model of that has less load volume than the smallest "Work" model. Customizing that is going to cost.

[Klinky]

Modifying 10,000 vehicles will certainly require large capital investment.