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In the Club
VFW spoke to Marco Natale, vice president, EMEA, Club Car about what the company is doing to help businesses switch to electric light CVs.
What plans does Club Car have for the light commercial vehicle sector in the UK?
Offering a solution for light commercial needs is crucial for Club Car both in the UK and everywhere in Europe, because it is an answer to the fast-growing demands of business, people and cities. This has a very strong link with how mobility is evolving into something closer to how we want to live and work – and how we expect mobility to impact our world.
Smaller tasks don’t need large heavy vehicles on our roads. People working in small mobility businesses need a safe and reliable solution both for effective working and the wellbeing and safety of their workers, while reducing traffic noise and CO₂ emissions.
What operations would the company be targeting with these products?
As said earlier, there is no specific set of tasks. At the moment, we can list a few that we see happening, but every day, people think of other tasks where these agile and efficient vehicles can replace other ways of working, making them safer and more efficient.
Today an important area is municipal tasks, from all kinds of public service maintenance to specific tasks such as waste collection and postal delivery. Every day these tasks are moving more towards fleets of small electric vehicles that guarantee a high mix of effectiveness for operators and people in their tasks. The wider area of logistics is obviously also a key segment in all its dimensions. Examples are Amazon door-to-door quick delivery, deliveries in restricted areas and shop re-stocking without noise during early morning deliveries. Then there are the food and grocery deliveries that, post-COVID, have moved from a need to a ‘nice to have’. That also involves refrigerated solutions from fresh to frozen products, the pharmacy and vaccine deliveries that require speed and controlled temperatures.
These are the main existing segments, but the more we move in the new way of considering mobility as an important building block of our sustainability efforts to create a better world and a safer environment for workers, these vehicles become more attractive for replacing other smaller or larger type of vehicles.
“Offering a solution for light commercial needs is crucial for Club Car in the UK and Europe, addressing fast-growing demands for safer, reliable mobility while reducing traffic noise and CO2 emissions.”
When do you plan to bring vehicles to market in the UK?
They are here already. We started distributing our URBAN vehicle two years ago and we immediately gained popularity and interest from all sectors, to the point of starting some specific projects in specific applications.
What carrying capacity do they provide?
- Up to 1,000kg payload
- 1.7m to 4m³ body volumes
- Homologated towing capacity
- N1 homologation passed and most rigorous real life crash tests
How would they be powered?
We offer a wide range of electric solutions from the regular lead acid battery to lithium battery packs ranging from six to 21kWh, offering WLTP range up to 129 miles. The average/most popular battery size would be 10kWh with 68 miles WLTP range.
How would the vehicles be sold?
These vehicles are sold by Club Car dealers that match the high-quality product with the safety and reliability that customers need. This is extremely important because, very often, a small electric vehicle is not a replacement for a similar vehicle. Instead it is the result of the decision to move on a different path from the past and consider different elements that are new and rising in importance – such as the environment and the user’s safety. This means it’s not only important how the vehicle performs, but also how we can support our customers to get all the value and incremental possible benefits from the decision to move to URBAN.
Our dealers are fully trained to support the initial decision, to be part of the ramp up into these businesses and provide any sort of extra help in case of need. We train our dealers to work alongside the customers who choose URBAN, not just to sell and deliver a new product. We want the Club Car dealers, as well as our whole organisation from design to manufacturing, to be one of the protagonists of the customer’s business that trust the URBAN solution and Club Car.
This is something that made Club Car extremely successful for more than 60 years globally – and this is what we are delivering and executing also for URBAN. Not many companies can offer the same level of close contact with customers for so many years. In the UK we have UK-based, local service by local people covering all areas.
How would Club Car provide after-sales and service support?
We manufacture within the EU, in Poland. Our dealers together with our own people are always available for support when needed. Once customers buy a Club Car product, an URBAN in this case, they become part of our core values and we take care of them in all ways.
Let me make it extremely clear, we are here to help our customers’ businesses grow, become more profitable and closer to their customers. We consider ourselves as part of a changing world, in personal and business mobility, and in this respect, we interpret our role from challenging the existing solution to evaluating the next solution, the next tasks and the next steps.
