BENTONVILLE (dpa-AFX) - General Motors Co.'s (GM) electric commercial vehicle business, BrightDrop, said on Wednesday that it had signed a new deal to supply electric vehicles to retail giant Walmart Inc. (WMT) and also extended its supply agreement with delivery firm FedEx Corp. (FDX).
The financial terms of the deals, announced in conjunction with the Consumer Electronics Show being held in Las Vegas, were not disclosed.
General Motoes, which entered the electric van business last January has estimated the U.S. market for parcel and food delivery vehicles to grow to more than $850 billion by 2025.
The Detroit automaker started delivering the EV600 van last month and will add the smaller EV410 in late 2023. It will open a plant dedicated to BrightDrop vehicles in Ingersoll, Ontario, in Canada in the fourth quarter of this year.
Under the deal with GM, Walmart will reserve 5,000 of BrightDrop's EV600 and smaller EV410 delivery vans as part of its goal to operate a zero-emission logistics fleet by 2040, the companies said.
Walmart plans to use the GM vans as part of its InHome delivery service, which it said on Wednesday it was rapidly expanding. The first BrightDrop vans will be delivered in early 2023.
Meanwhile, FedEx, which had begun taking delivery of 500 EVs from GM last year, is reserving another 2,000 over the next few years and is negotiating to take up to an additional 20,000 after that. FedEx also wants to achieve a carbon-neutral footprint for its global operations by 2040.
FedEx expects to add more than 200,000 electric medium-sized delivery vehicles by 2040, and GM's current two named models cover two-thirds of those needs
FedEx also has discussed GM supplying the larger vehicles with more cargo space that would meet the company's needs required by the remaining one-third. GM Chief Executive Mary Barra had earlier said that BrightDrop would offer a full-size van.
Both FedEx and Walmart officials said that their deals with GM were not exclusive and they have talked with other EV makers.
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