Polish Delivery King Electrifying Fleet, Including Installing EV Chargers

The electric vehicle revolution is reaching more and more markets, and that can happen in varying ways. Sometimes tiny electric cars stimulate rapid EV growth, sometimes it’s big SUVs and trucks electrifying, sometimes it’s something else. In the case of Poland, the electric delivery vehicle market is becoming a big part of the story, as have big purchases of electric buses.

The story this month is that InPost, the largest delivery company in Poland, is building a network of charging stations in order to support its growing electric vehicle fleet — which are several hundred strong at the moment. InPost has already installed 200 charging points, in partnership with GreenWay. These are being installed in logistics centers and near the company’s popular parcel lockers (the company has more than 20,000 located across Poland).

Interestingly, InPost and GreenWay are also going to be putting in charging stations for the public to use. A company exec explains their take on this matter and why they’re doing what they’re doing. “The expansion of the charger network at our own sites is of particular importance to us due to the decarbonisation strategy of the InPost Group,” said Sebastian Anioł, director of the firm’s logistics innovation department. That makes sense, but what about the public chargers? “We believe that new technologies and trends should be taken into account in the development plans of cities. That is why, together with GreenWay, we are working on implementing a widely available network of such devices in Poland.”

If you want one big stat to take home from this article, it’s got to be this one: InPost delivered 30 million parcels in 2022 using its electric delivery vans. Imagine how many more it can deliver as the fleet expands and InPost and GreenWay roll out a vast EV charging network.

GreenWay has been the EV charging leader in Poland for years, as well as in its home country of Slovakia and some other Central European markets. Cofounder Peter Badik has been a CleanTechnica reader for at least a decade. You can watch or read about an interview I conducted with him in 2017, in connection to a CleanTechnica conference GreenWay helped to sponsor — and compare his thoughts and dreams then to what GreenWay has accomplished since then.

Unfortunately, Poland has not been leading the way forward on EV sales. “The latest European data, which cover 2021, show that Poland had one of the continent’s lowest figures for newly registered electric cars that year. The country was the only one to object to the EU’s ban on the sale of new petrol and diesel cars from 2035, saying it is too ambitious.” Poland needs more EV leaders, including more people and companies taking bold action and investing more into EVs and EV infrastructure. InPost is one of those leaders, and could continue to lead in bigger and bigger ways if it chooses to do so.

Poland had a target of 1 million passenger EVs on Poland’s roads by 2025, but it is lagging way behind this goal. The country had 73,695 passenger EVs on the road by the end of April 2023. The country has updated its target to 600,000 EVs on the road by 2030.