What electrifying the last mile actually changes

There is a comfortable story about fleet electrification that goes like this: you buy electric vans instead of diesel ones, you plug them in overnight, and the routes carry on exactly as before, only cleaner and cheaper to fuel. It is a good story. It is also wrong in almost every operational detail, and the operators who believe it are the ones who end up with an expensive van sitting idle at a charger during peak.

We have spent the last two years helping Baltic operators fold EVs into fleets that still run mostly on diesel, and the lesson is consistent: electrification is not a procurement decision with a planning footnote. It is a planning problem with a procurement footnote. Here is what actually changes.

Range becomes a routing constraint, not a spec sheet number

A diesel van's range is effectively infinite for last-mile purposes — you refuel in five minutes, once, and forget about it. An electric van's usable range is a live constraint that the route has to respect, and it is never the number on the brochure. Cold weather, which the Baltics has in abundance, can cut real-world range by a quarter or more because the battery works harder and the cabin needs heating. A stop-start urban route with the doors constantly opening drains more than a steady run. Payload matters. Terrain matters.

This means range has to enter the planner as a genuine constraint, the same way vehicle capacity or a driver's shift length does. A route that a diesel van would finish comfortably might exceed what an electric van can do on a January morning with a full load. If your planning system does not model state of charge across the route, it will happily build a plan the vehicle cannot physically complete — and you will find out at stop seventy, in the dark, in someone's suburb.

Charging is a scheduling problem

The overnight-charging story works right up until you have more vans than chargers, or a route that needs a top-up mid-shift, or an electricity tariff that makes charging at 18:00 cost three times what it costs at 02:00. Then charging becomes something you have to schedule as carefully as the deliveries themselves.

Depot charging capacity is usually the real bottleneck, not battery range. A depot with a limited grid connection can only charge so many vehicles at once, which means the plan has to stagger which vans charge when, sequence departures around charger availability, and sometimes accept a slower charge to stay within the site's power limit. This is a constraint-satisfaction problem, and it interacts directly with the routing: the van that draws the sparse rural round needs to leave with a full battery and cannot be the one still charging at 07:00.

The question stops being "does the van have enough range?" and becomes "given our chargers, our tariff and tomorrow's orders, which vehicle should do which route, and when does each one charge?"

Not every route is a good candidate — and that is fine

The most useful thing we tell operators is that they do not have to electrify everything at once, and they should not try. EVs shine on exactly the routes where last-mile delivery already works best: dense, urban, predictable, moderate daily distance, returning to the same depot each night. Those routes stay comfortably within range, charge on a regular overnight cycle, and benefit most from low urban running costs and zero tailpipe emissions in city centres that increasingly restrict diesel.

The sparse rural routes — long distances, unpredictable, sometimes exceeding a single charge — are the worst candidates, and they are also the ones where diesel's quick refuelling matters most. So the sensible path is not a fleet-wide switch. It is to identify the subset of routes that are natural EV candidates, assign your electric vehicles there, and let the planner keep them there. Over time, as range improves and charging networks fill in, the boundary moves. But you capture most of the benefit early by being selective.

The data you need before you buy anything

If you are considering electrification, the analysis to run first is not "how many vans should we buy?" It is "which of our existing routes would an electric van have completed comfortably over the last twelve months, accounting for winter?" That is a question you answer by replaying your real historical routes against a state-of-charge model — same stops, same loads, same weather, but simulating the battery.

The output tells you how many of your routes are EV-ready today, how many would be with a modest range improvement, and how much depot charging capacity you would actually need to serve them. It turns electrification from a leap of faith into a staged plan with numbers behind it. That is the analysis we run for operators before they commit a single euro of capital, and it almost always reveals that the right first step is smaller, cheaper and lower-risk than the fleet-wide vision they walked in with.

Electrify the planning first

The uncomfortable truth is that most of the value of electrification is unlocked in software, not steel. A diesel fleet planned well beats an electric fleet planned badly on both cost and emissions, because the biggest lever on emissions is the same as the biggest lever on cost: kilometres not driven. Get the routing tight, get the density up, get the channel mix right — and then electrify the routes that are ready. In that order, the vans pay off. In the other order, they charge.