After taxis, Seoul government aims to convert delivery riders and courier trucks to EVs

The Seoul Metropolitan Government has pledged to convert all delivery motorbikes and courier diesel trucks to electric vehicles (EV) by 2025. The government will sign an agreement with various companies on 29-November-2021 to kickstart the process.

In the agreement, the Seoul Metropolitan Government and the Korean Ministry of Environment will provide subsidies for EV purchases and the building of charging infrastructures for the companies.

There are a total of 215,000 delivery bikes operating in downtown Seoul. 35,000 of which are full-time delivery vehicles and operate more than five days a week. The rest of the bikes are operating for small businesses, delivery companies, and quick services.

The city of Seoul aims to convert at least 62,000 of these bikes to EVs by 2025, they hope that all 35,000 full-time delivery vehicles will be converted to EVs by then.

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At the moment, the uptake of electric motorcycles is still very low as they only have a range of 50 km per charge. Charging these bikes also takes a while, so to many delivery riders that travel an average of 150 to 200 km per day, they would rather not make the switch to EVs.

To resolve the issue, the Seoul City council is working with various companies to develop electric bikes that come with standard charging mode and has a long distant range on one charge.

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Other than that, KT Linkers will also be installing 200 battery swapping stations in the city by 2025. The stations will use public phone booths to supplement the charging distance for these electric bikes.

As for the diesel courier vehicles, the Seoul government is working with four main courier companies to install chargers in logistics centres. At the moment there are 6,100 delivery trucks operating in downtown Seoul, 97 percent of these are diesel-powered.

The plan to convert delivery motorcycles and trucks to EVs is the second part of the Seoul government’s plan to encourage the adoption of EVs in the city. Previously, the Korean Ministry of Environment announced plans to convert 10,000 taxis to zero-emission vehicles by 2025.

Also read: Korea aims to put 10k EV taxis on the road by 2025