With delivery, Cortes says Walmart is incorporating 1,100 all-electric vans it purchased into its fleet this year, and that it has reserved 5,000 General Motors BrightDrop EVs which will hit the road in 2023. “A lot of these companies we’ve had a long relationship with… They know that we’re giving an aim point to decarbonize, so there’s a lot of incentive to transform their engine capability, because they see that’s where a customer like Walmart is going,” McCollum says. While Walmart has made at least one investment in one of its last-mile startups, DroneUp, the company hasn’t invested in any of the companies behind its trucking pilot programs, according to Walmart.
Walmart has also been testing out zero-emissions electric yard trucks, like Autocar’s all-electric terminal tractor, in its distribution centers over the last year, and it has been working with Thermo King to haul produce and other groceries in an electric-powered refrigerated trailer-among other efforts. It’s working with Chevron to supply its trucks with CNG linked to renewable natural gas. Early next year, Walmart is going to start adding Cummins’ new 15-liter natural gas engine to a few of its trucks. Later this year, Walmart is going to be testing Capacity’s second generation hydrogen fuel cell-powered yard truck. “If you think about yard trucks, we have at least nine pilots going on as we speak-and more to come,” McCollum says. Yesterday, Cortes gave a presentation about how the company was decarbonizing its truck fleet, and he and Luke McCollum, Walmart’s vice president of supply chain sustainability, sat down with me to talk about the efforts in a subsequent interview. “The reality today is that there is no scalable solution for us,” Fernando Cortes, senior vice president of transportation, told me at the Up.Summit, a mobility conference taking place in Bentonville, Ark.
Collectively, Walmart’s fleet is traveling some 1.1 billion miles each year and making up some 24% of the company’s scope one emissions (meaning the emissions Walmart produces from its own assets). Walmart has more than 90,000 trucks or trailers-what it refers to as its Class 8 fleet-and works with 12,000 drivers. (A Walmart spokeswoman confirmed the retailer was doing “small scale work” with Serve Robotics and said that Walmart is “constantly testing new and up and coming technology to identify solutions that best meet our customers’ needs.”)īut it’s Walmart’s behemoth supply chain that poses the biggest problem.
#WALMART VENTURE SERIES#
The company has been tackling its emissions from a series of angles, such as with its last-mile delivery efforts with venture-backed drone company startups like Zipline or DroneUp, driverless deliveries with Gatik, or via the electric robots you might spot roaming a sidewalk in Bentonville, through Serve Robotics.
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