By our dpa-correspondent and Dusseldorf (dpa) - The German postal service, Deutsche Post, plans to build its own electric delivery vans, dubbed the Streetscooter, with the first models expected to roll off production lines this year, the company said Saturday.The first 2,000 vehicles are due to be manufactured in 2016, with the company gradually replacing its fleet of 30,000 delivery vans with the Streetscooter, Deutsche Post said, confirming an earlier report in Germany‘s Focus news magazine.Streetscooter was founded as a start-up in 2010 as an offshoot from RWTH University in the border city of Aachen. Deutsche Post took over the company a year and a half ago with the intention of using its know-how to build vehicles for postal deliverers.In the longer term, Deutsche Post plans to market the Streetscooter."There have been enquiries. At the moment, however, we need the production capacity ourselves," Juergen Gerdes, manager of the postal service‘s parcel division, told Focus magazine.Letter and parcel deliverers were closely involved in the development of the vehicles, Gerdes said."There are quite clear ideas of how a vehicle should be optimally supplied for deliveries," he said.The delivery van has a much larger storage area, which is technically fitted out according to the needs of the delivery personnel.With its in-house developed electric vehicle, Deutsche Post sees itself as a foil to electric car pioneer Tesla. "They build high-value vehicles for private customers, we can build tools for business customers that are aggressively priced," Gerdes told Focus.
Deutsche Post's has announced it is ready to build its own StreetScooter electric vans, expecting to build 2k units this year, which will join a handful of variously-branded electric vans already used by the service. Officials hope to replace Deutsche Post entire 30k-unit fleet of internal combustion vans with electric vehicles, however it is not yet known if the entire fleet will be replaced with Deutsche Post's’s own vehicles. While Deutsche Post's plans to initially build these vans exclusively for its own use, it is reportedly considering sales to fleet customers in the future.