Solving urban delivery dilemmas: MellowVans MD on turning to three wheels

How safe is the MellowVan, and were any changes made to bring it to the UK?

We’re very proud of vehicle safety. You can’t drive it without the safety belt engaged, it won’t allow you to pull off.

We’ve had about six or seven serious accidents. The worst one was that one of these was hit by an eight-tonne truck going about 60kph (37mph), then got pushed across an intersection into an electricity substation. The driver got out and walked away without a scratch.

Of all the others, the only major injury we’ve had was a driver who, again, got knocked by a truck and the vehicle toppled over. He fractured his arm.

But every other serious accident, the driver didn’t even go to hospital. That’s because we’ve got a really robust safety cage with a three-point safety belt. We are fully homologated with type approved for Europe, the UK, and Switzerland.

There was quite a bit of work that we needed to do on the pull test for the safety belt, to make sure that it was robust and adequate. The other big thing that we weren’t able to test in South Africa was electromagnetic emissions. We had to do a little bit of work on the charger to make sure that it was complying.

We don’t have an export and a local variant. It’s all the same vehicle. Luckily, with a three-wheeler, you don’t have a left and right-hand drive variant.

Can fleets customise it to their needs? For example, can they option doors for those rainy UK days?

People always ask about the open sides. We have got an option where we fit canvas and plastic, it looks quite nice. It’s completely watertight, but the drivers prefer this open variant, because they are in and out of the vehicle constantly. So, it’s a hassle for them to have to climb in and out, unzip, zip again.

We’ve got reverse sensors at the back, but the first commercial vehicles we bring into the UK will have a slightly different display, which will incorporate a reverse camera. That’s quite important, because you’ve got your side mirrors, but you can’t see through the back.

 We have almost certainly overspecified the battery for these kind of uses. The battery’s 11.7kWh, but we’ve got a seven kWh as well, which I think will almost certainly be good enough for this application. It’s more than £1,000 cheaper than the 11.7.

Our approach for this market is to initially sell the bigger battery. We’d rather have people with too much capacity than too little. I’m very confident that the seven will work.

DHL are a good customer of ours. I think they’ll be the first guys we would supply with a seven kW. Their average mileage for the DHL express business, which is a parcel business, in London, is about 30 miles a day. The seven kW will do that and still have 50% capacity left.

We do make a passenger version, which will be for sale in the UK. We haven’t made a big song and dance about it, because I don’t think the demand is necessarily that big. It’s the driver in front, and then two seats in the back. Two plastic, covered seats. And they’ve just got lap belts.

When will the first UK customers get their vans?

We will take orders now, delivery will take at least two months, because it’s a six-week trip in a container in the vessel. And you’ve got to load the thing and offload it. From order to delivery in the UK won’t be quicker than two months.

If it’s an order of any kind of substance, then we’ll do monthly deliveries until we fulfil the order. We build them in our facility in Stellenbosch just outside Cape Town.

What sort of fleets have you had interest from so far?

The names you would know would be DHL, Aramex, DPD, GLS. Those are all big international players. Our biggest customer in South Africa is a company called Takealot. They are our equivalent of Amazon. They are by far the biggest e-commerce operator in South Africa.

We’ve now had a couple of really interesting conversations with Amazon in both Italy and Spain. If the tests work there, the next place to test it is here. We’ve had some initial discussions with Royal Mail, but so has everyone in the world. They’re just such a big fish, but that would be the perfect application for this.

We’ve spoken to the likes of Tesco, Asda and Sainsbury’s. We’ve started a couple of quite good conversations in the UK.

I’ve also had a couple of good conversations with some big companies that do fleet sales and support maintenance but have their own sales capabilities. We haven’t decided on a UK distributor yet. It’s important to have someone in country. We can’t fly in and out and think we can manage it remotely.

Could you handle a major order from a fleet at the moment?

We can build 100 vehicles a month with reasonable comfort. By then, the bottleneck becomes the body. You’ve got eight body panels in fibreglass.

If we get to that kind of volume, we would want to move to mass production, which entails quite a bit more money, for tooling to be able to injection-mould body panels. Once we’ve manufactured the tooling and set up the production line, we’ll be able to do 20, 30,000 vehicles a year.

If we start approaching 100 a month, that’s an indication that we need to start looking to tool up.

We will almost certainly start assembling vehicles in the UK, which will mean shorter lead times. That means sending knock-down vehicles here. In time, I think we’ll probably build from scratch, but that’s down the line.

We can fit five of these in a single container. If we knock them down, we can probably have the chassis welded up cheaper here than in South Africa. We can have the motor, the throttles, the battery delivered directly to the assembly line. It would speed things up.

What type of maintenance does it require, and what sort of support do you offer?

The major things that need attention are brake pad replacement, wiper blade replacement, brake fluid and tyres. We’ll start with the brake fluid, you can see whether it’s full or not. We touch the vehicle every quarter, we check if the brake pads need replacing, top up the fluids. Those are the major things.

Now and again, you might have a software problem. That’s very rare. We have a number of vehicle control units (VCUs) available with up-to-date software. You can literally take the VCU out, put a new one in and it’ll be up-to-date.

Our battery is accessible via GSM, via chip or via Wi-Fi. We can remotely diagnose, reset, and work on a battery, within reason.

We had a fairly interesting, fairly complicated thing in Spain, where our engineer, just on WhatsApp with the camera, was able to talk the guy through what needed to happen and managed to fix a fault. Anyone who can service a motorbike will be able to service this vehicle.

It is really not very complicated. Any German vehicle almost certainly has the same brand of motor that we have, Valeo. The battery and the rest of it is fairly robust.

We built this with the idea of exporting and selling in Europe and the UK. This thing operates on poor roads, with potholes, and off-road on dirt.

In equivalent environments here, parts of the city with cobbled or uneven streets, it shouldn’t be a problem. It has been built to last.