Environmental protection measures by Ikea: Electric delivery truck

D he Ikea principle has been learned in Germany over generations. You drive to the furniture store outside the city gates, choose Billy, Pax and Co. on a given tour and then leave the goods issue with one or more stacks of cardboard boxes. Somehow you can get all of this into the car, ideally the station wagon or van was borrowed from a neighbor. If you find your way to the Swedish world of living without a car or in a roadster, there have been rental vans for many years.

The concept of delivering goods to the customer's address is much more prevalent abroad. Anyone who visits an Ikea branch in Shanghai, Beijing or New York City has usually come by public transport, taxi or Uber and Co. The Ikea delivery service fleet was therefore an approach for the company to predict zero local emissions as early as 2018. According to the plan, every Ikea delivery truck should be electric by 2025. This should be the case in five big cities as early as 2020, namely Shanghai, New York, Los Angeles, Paris, Amsterdam and London.

Ikea trucks in Shanghai are electric

In the Chinese megacity, this goal was achieved before the self-set date. As the online medium Fast Company reports, the entire fleet of Ikea trucks in the Shanghai metropolitan area has been converted to electric drives since January 2019. Some of them belong to Ikea's local distribution partner. The majority of the vehicles are used on behalf of a leasing company, which is also responsible for expanding a charging infrastructure in the city. According to the information, several thousand charging points are available.

Another Ikea furniture store is to be built in Shanghai in 2020, which will have direct access to the city's subway network. It remains to be seen whether the passengers will have to share the space with furniture, decorative pillows and potted plants.