IOC fellow, Sam Clarke, chair of the Institute's electric vehicle group,

Having spent ten years putting electric vans into the logistics framework in urban areas, I’m now enjoying taking them out again! It is simply not enough to electrify your fleet. EV’s are great for zero tailpipe emissions but still contribute to congestion and in turn, particulate emissions that we breathe. We cannot keep adding more and more small vans into the mix and Gnewt's Portering model is a means to deliver more volume but actually reduce the vehicles on the road simultaneously. To that end, I’m hugely proud of getting this project into a commercialised state which could not have happened without the Ford Smart Mobility team and their technology driving it.

The Warehouse on wheels concept is designed to be compatible both with Ford vans and those of other manufacturers. These vans then act as dynamic delivery hubs that collect orders from a depot and then briefly stop at strategic locations determined to be the most efficient for each batch of orders. Ford’s proprietary software platform co-ordinates with nearby foot couriers – or potentially with bicycle couriers, drones and autonomous robots in the future – to fulfil the last leg of each delivery.

Tom Thompson, project lead, Ford Mobility.

Our goal is to keep larger vehicles like delivery vans operating in the high-load, less-congested environments in which they perform best. However, for the last mile of a journey into an urban area, where congestion and lack of parking can be a challenge, it makes sense to offload deliveries to more nimble, efficient and cost-effective modes of transport.