The BrightDrop Zevo 600 electric light commercial van has now been deployed in California, New York, and Texas by rental truck and logistics company Ryder System, Inc.
Units of the BrightDrop Zevo 600 are now active at “four strategic Ryder facilities” across the three states, the company says, and are currently available for customer rental.
Ryder says its new BrightDrop Zevo rentals, marketed as the RyderElectric+ turnkey EV solution, are “helping make electrification possible for companies big and small.” The electric vans are available to rent along with Ryder’s usual suite of supporting services, including insurance, 24-hour roadside assistance, vehicle tracking, maintenance, and similar aids. Electrification advisory services are also offered for commercial customers.
The current locations where the BrightDrop Zevo 600 vans can be rented include Santa Fe Springs and Hayward in California, Saginaw in the Dallas-Fort Worth area in Texas, and Long Island City in New York State. The rental facilities are equipped with ChargePoint EV chargers to keep the vans fully juiced between rentals.
Ryder hosted “Ride and Drive” events at the locations as an introduction to the EV vans, enabling customers to try out the vehicles in a hands-on test.
Ryder says it has ordered 200 BrightDrop Zevo 600 vans in 2023, but plans to expand its fleet to 4,000 units by the end of 2025. It did not reveal how many of the commercial EVs it has received or the total number currently available for rental at the four locations.
As a reminder, the BrightDrop Zevo 600 offers more than 600 cubic feet of cargo space, with its Ultium Battery technology and Ultium Drive propulsion systems rated at 300 horsepower, 390 pound-feet of torque, and an approximate range of 250 miles per charge. The BrightDrop Zevo 600 also features numerous modern safety technologies as standard, including Front and Rear Park Assist, Automatic Emergency Braking, Forward Collision Alert, and several others.
GM logistics subsidiary BrightDrop plans to open 19 sales and service centers for the vehicle across North America by mid-2024. However, production of the BrightDrop Zevo 600 will be halted from October through spring 2024 due to a shortage of battery packs.
The BrightDrop Zevo 600 is currently produced exclusively at the GM CAMI Assembly plant in Canada.
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Comments
When I rent a van, I want to be able to use it. I don’t want to spend part of my user time charging the vehicle. That’s downtime on my dime. No thanks!
No kidding. Every time you rent a vehicle you are expected to return it the same or more “fuel” than it had when you picked it up. Otherwise, you are charged a ridiculous fee. But no way on my dime after using a cargo van for a half-day or more, am I going to track down a charging station designed and built for passenger-sized vehicles. Trying to position/fit the cargo van in a charging stall would be bad enough. But even assuming success, I’m not wasting hours of my time waiting for the van to recharge enough to return it.
Maybe Ryder expects most renters to return the vans without having been recharged. If so, their pricing should reflect this expectation in order to be competitive.
I would most definitely find a company renting ICE vans and skip the EV.
The six plus month closure of the plant because of battery problems is the real headline. The evidence of the fiasco that is Ultium grows every day.
The idea of renting ANY EV without requiring evidence of a customers’ experience with them is just asking for it. Not sure how you would do that, but it’s still a bad idea. Tech is too new and not mature enough.
While I agree that Ryder is likely not the best use for these trucks (although you can charge while loading/unloading), I think BrightDrop is GM’s best EV effort to date. I see a lot of the RIVIAN Amazon delivery vehicles as that market is taking off – that’s where GM should focus.
I would never rent one of those? Where would I charge it? I can fuel an ICE truck anywhere anytime in 5 minutes!
That’s some of the last of these vans that anyone will receive now that that the plant is preparing to shut down until next April due to a battery shortage. The batteries are produced at GM/LG owned facilities.
It will be interesting to see in GM third quarter auto sales numbers next week, how many electric trucks this plant has produced. They first started hand building these trucks two years ago. Now Bright Drop has had a huge plant to build these trucks with automation assy lines for a full year now. So lets see. give us the numbers. All the talk, now put up. Ford been eating GM lunch with Ford Pro. Time to build in volume. No more talk, give me some numbers.