British roadside assistance company AA has taken delivery of 15 battery-electric Ford Transit Customs and 15 plug-in hybrid variants. The new vans now have to prove themselves in the “real world.”
According to AA, the vans will hit the road in cities such as Birmingham, Bristol, Glasgow, Nottingham, Liverpool and London. Moreover, they will “undergo a series of structured tests.” That includes looking at the practicality of home and strategic charging. The company points out that “all patrols in the trial will have chargers installed at home to enable low-carbon ways of working with both home and on-the-go charging supported by our partners at Rightcharge.”
Another important factor for a roadside assistance service is its towing capacity. The fully electric variant has a range of 236 miles (380 kilometres). However, the company says it will initially calculate with a range of 120 miles (193 kilometres) to account for towing. According to AA, the PHEV variant has a full compact recovery trailer (CRT) set-up – that is not further specified for the BEVs.
“The famous yellow van has seen countless improvements over the decades, but few innovations can be more important than the latest, which sees our ever-reliable fleet of Ford Transit Customs begin its transition to BEV and PHEV,” says Duncan Webb, AA’s head of fleet. “The performance of the low-emissions vehicles we launched earlier this year continues to achieve or exceed our expectations. The results, so far, have proved that our “test and scale” approach remains, for us, the most common-sense way of tackling what are unprecedented challenges.”
Read more: electrive
