Back in 2014, the German Post (the national post office organization) made the decision to slip over and get into e-mobiles. So they hired up this company to build this vehicle and produce around 200 of them a year. About 18 months into this idea, they enlarged production and were aiming at making 2,000 a year. Within six months, they put the next goal up....they'd get around to 10,000 vehicles a year.
How many post office vans/trucks exist in Germany? Officially on the books, around 70,000 (more or less). So you can figure, even if they did get to the 10,000 per year level, this would still take six to seven years.
Well....ARD (public TV in Germany, Channel One) came up this morning and noted this new development.
Apparently, the program was very successful, and the Swiss postal folks also bought into the same brand/model. Last year, they had two fires (burning up the mail-contents of both trucks). They made the decision in the past week or so....to withdraw all 460 of their delivered e-mobiles from service.
It might be worth mentioning here.....that the German Post folk had two e-mobile fires in the past year as well. So a survey/review is underway. No one is saying production will halt, but there is some concern going on.
Simple a design flaw? Unknown. It might just be a bad battery or two that was produced with reduced standards. It might be human error in the use/operation.
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