Ikea is one of those companies that is going all-in on electric vehicles. The Swedish-based company has a goal of have all its products delivered using electric trucks by 2025 and has announced they will only sign new delivery contracts with companies that transport their using electric vehicles.
That’s super aggressive and Australia is of course included in that target.
IKEA Australia currently has 10 stores since opening its first in Richmond, Melbourne back in 2003. The company wants 5% of it’s fleet to be EVs by July this year and 10% by financial year 2020.
While some countries get government assistance, Australia’s politicians have been unable to construct an incentive scheme to accelerate the transition to electric vehicles (commercial or personal).
Jan Gardberg is the country manager for IKEA in Australia and has called on the government to be “much more active” in supporting EVs.
Given we have a federal election in May, now’s the perfect time to try and get it on the agenda and certainly could be a policy differentiation between the two majors.
Interviewed by AFR, Mr Gardberg said
There are no incentives for anyone switching over to electric vehicles. Look at countries like Norway and Sweden and Germany where it has been a collaboration very much with government and industry and the communities to paint out the direction.
It was not “super impressive” that Australia had less than 5000 private electric cars on its roads for a population of 25 million. It’s inevitable that, in the end, it’s going to go electrical and it’s just a question about who would like to be there in the beginning and help that process.
Right now, many customers pickup goods from IKEA themselves, but increasingly customers are taking advantage of home delivery. To date, this requires around 100 vehicles for large IKEA furniture, while smaller home furnishings are delivered by another 250 vehicles every day across Australia.
If you’ve ever tried to get IKEA delivered to a location at distance, lets say Wodonga from the Melbourne stores, then you’ll be aware the cost of delivery at IKEA is prohibitive. While mandating the electric delivery of product to customers is not going to help that situation, it may help some buyers feel better about buying from the company.
Right now, the company contracts (doesn’t own any) to companies that mean 7 electric vehicles are being used to deliver IKEA goods in Sydney, Perth and Melbourne, so there’s definitely a long road ahead.
While the world waits for Tesla to release it’s Semi, there’s a very handy company SAE Electric from Australia that is making at least 9 different commercial vehicles that’d be perfect for IKEA.
More info via Australian Financial Review.
