Fluid Truck has ordered 40 additional electric delivery trucks from Lightning eMotors for its New York City fleet. These vehicles will be utilized by XPO Logistics and NAL Group in their support of IKEA Retail US last-mile delivery efforts. The electric trucks will service all five boroughs, IKEA said.

Ten electric delivery box trucks from Lightning eMotors have already been put into service within the Fluid Truck network system to serve Manhattan. An additional 30 vehicles from Colorado-based Lightning eMotors will be deployed over the next few months.

The Lightning Electric Class 4 commercial box trucks will deliver products to all five boroughs of New York City. They feature 129 kWhs of battery capacity with a range of 120 miles and can be charged in just under two hours by an 80-kW on-board DC fast charger.

The new all-electric vehicles are being deployed by third-party logistics partners NAL Group and XPO Logistics. The companies are renting the vehicles via the Fluid Truck rental platform, which allows businesses to rent and pickup vehicles from nearby locations 24/7, 365 days a year.

The electric delivery trucks will operate out of a new 975,000-square-foot distribution center on Staten Island. The center is managed by CEVA Logistics, a global logistics firm.

Fluid Truck is the process of incorporating 600 Lightning Electric vehicles onto their platform, rolling out the vehicles to several cities throughout the United States. Users can book vehicles through the Fluid Truck website or their mobile application.

The Lightning-Fluid partnership provides a highly flexible arrangement for our customer operators and drivers. This means that the vehicles can be used by other fleets when they are not needed by XPO Logistics or NAL Group. Electric vehicles already have a high ROI, and this makes that even higher because the utilization rates of these vehicles will be maximized.

—James Eberhard, founder and CEO of Fluid Truck

These last-mile delivery vehicles feature Lightning Analytics, a cloud-based telematics system that provides predictive maintenance, route scoring, range analysis, driver behavior, and geofencing for maximum range and efficiency.