As Iceland begins to assess electrifying its 1,800-strong home delivery fleet, the supermarket is putting its Ford eTransit demo van to the test in the EV Rally Cymru 2025. Phil Cane, Head of Commercial Fleet, explains why the rally is a crucial opportunity to trial real-world EV performance and assess the public charging infrastructure
What has made you decide to get involved in the EV Rally Cymru?
The event is a fantastic opportunity for us to develop our understanding of the suitability of eVans within our 1800 strong fleet of home delivery vehicles. We’re at the beginning of our journey into eVans for our home delivery fleet and look forward to using the experience gained to further develop our plans in this area.
Please tell us about your team - who is driving and in what vehicles?
We’ve been working closely with the team at Ford and will be entering our eTransit Demo van. The product has been converted by the team at Paneltex to allow us to deliver a comparable payload and volume of product as our ICE vehicles. The vehicle consistently achieves a range of around 140 miles, meaning that half of the fleet could complete a full day’s deliveries on a single charge.
The van will be driven by Phil Cane, Head of Commercial Fleet, Iceland and Chris Thorning, Fleet Development Manager, Iceland.
Do you anticipate any challenges on the rally, and if so, do you have a particular strategy to get you through them?
Our current hurdles to EV adoption centre around the charging infrastructure for EVs as many of our stores do not have the space for us to charge our vans. To reduce the operational complexity around this we need industry and government support to enable faster rollout and standardisation of bookable, publicly available charging infrastructure.
We look forward to putting the EV charging infrastructure across Wales to the test. Our vehicle will have a more limited range compared to some of the other entrants, so we’re expecting to need to make good use of local charging infrastructure to complete the course.
Why are events like the EV Rally important for the driving up EV adoption?
This event is a great opportunity to highlight the benefits of EV adoption and the operational challenges the technology poses in some ‘real life’ applications. We’ll also be using it to benchmark the product we’re using against our fellow entrants!
Please tell us about Iceland's current and future decarbonisation plans?
At Iceland we seek to build a growing, profitable and responsible business that does the right thing for our colleagues and customers, the communities we serve, the planet and future generations. We believe that every business has a responsibility to take action against climate change and reduce its carbon footprint.
We are working hard to cut down the carbon emissions in our own operations, reduce our energy demand, and maximise the use of environmentally-friendly gases. As such, we have achieved a 40% reduction in operational carbon since 2011 and 14% of our annual electricity comes from a large off site solar farm. We have also committed to net zero for all products sold in the UK by 2040.
Iceland is a signatory to the Courtauld Commitment 2030. This ambitious voluntary agreement brings together organisations across the food industry to make food and drink production and consumption more sustainable.
In 2020 we updated our targets to reduce our carbon footprint across our own operations and supply chain by:
• 50% reduction in absolute GHG emissions by 2030
• Net Zero for electricity use by 2030
• Net zero for UK fuel, gas and refrigerant gas by 2035
• Net zero for all products sold in the UK by 2040
In February 2021 we were the first food retailer globally to sign up to the Amazon Climate Pledge, a commitment to be net-zero by 2040 – a decade ahead of the Paris Agreement’s goal of 2050.