General Motors’ BrightDrop announced that during the first quarter of 2023, it produced more than 500 Zevo 600 all-electric vans at the CAMI Assembly plant in Ontario, Canada.
Shipping of the first Canadian-built vehicles to customers already started, just a few months after the manufacturing facility was opened in December 2022. Initially, a small number of vans were produced in Michigan just to jump-start the new brand.
GM has invested some $800 million to convert the plant in Canada and prepare it for large-scale production of purpose-built electric vans at a volume of up to 50,000 units annually by 2025.
The 2023 model year Zevo 600 model is already sold out, but the new 2024 model year is not far away – BrightDrop opened reservations for the model year 2024 vehicles, with deliveries expected to begin by mid-year 2023. The smaller Zevo 400 model is expected to enter series production in late 2023.
BrightDrop released an interesting image to present the progress:
At the same time, the company announced that its newest customer, Ryder, plans to add 4,000 BrightDrop EVs (Zevo 600 and Zevo 400 models) to their rental and lease fleet through 2025.
In the case of Ryder, the first 200 units will be ordered this year. The vans will have a range of up to 250 miles (400 km) and can support a payload of about 2,000 to 3,400 lbs (Zevo 600’s cargo capacity of over 600 cubic feet and Zevo 400’s cargo capacity of over 400 cubic feet).
“Ryder plans to deploy model year 2023 Zevo 600 electric vans in its rental fleet in California, Dallas-Fort Worth, and New York City later this year. The new 2024 Zevo 600 and Zevo 400 models for lease and rental customers are expected to be available as early as summer 2023 and into the first quarter of 2024.”
BrightDrop noted that in just two years, it secured more than 30 commercial customers and framework agreements (non-binding) for thousands of vehicles.
As far as we know, the number of reservations for the Zevo 600 and Zevo 400 models exceeded 25,000. It actually might be even much higher now.
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