Co-op News | Winter Quarterly 2024
The Co-op Has a New Electric Van!
Our Prepared Foods department is happily zipping around town in a new fully electric Ford E-Transit van. The Co-op makes at least one trip per day between both store locations to deliver our tasty house-made products and act as a courier shuttle for any other internal staff needs.
We’ve even been known to deliver our freshly baked pizzas to entire schools. Those daily trips mean miles can add up really quickly even in relatively small towns like ours. With our switch to our E-Transit van, which was bought locally of course, we are saying ‘no thank you’ to tailpipe emissions and saying ‘goodbye’ to the gas station!
Why we love it:
- The drive is better and more enjoyable for our staff.
- Zero tailpipe emissions, we are reducing our contribution to greenhouse gases by keeping about 9,800 lbs of CO2 out of the atmosphere every year.
- Way lower maintenance cost, there’s no oil changes and no transmission problems.
- This van never needs gas! Between rising gas prices plus the environmental impacts of extracting and trucking gas we feel pretty good about commuting fully-electric. Switching this one vehicle means avoiding a minimum of 538 gallons of gasoline per year!
- Electricity is certainly cheaper than gasoline on a per-mile basis because we charge during ‘off-peak’ pricing hours. Based on current pricing as of January, we are getting 45 more miles for the same price we would pay for one gallon of gas.
Electric vehicles (EVs), including transit vans, are very efficient for these shorter distances. They are equipped with a regenerative braking system (captures and reuses energy) making them incredibly effective for stop-and-go city driving. Given the distance and frequency of trips between our two
Co-op locations- going electric was an easy decision.
