The What Van? Road Test: Iveco eDaily

Date: Thursday, March 28, 2024

Detail Engine Copy

Powertrain

All Dailies are rear-wheel-drive and the electric motor mounted towards the rear of eDaily’s chassis generates 400Nm of torque. With two batteries eDaily can use both 80kW DC charging and 22kW AC charging.

Depending on the charging facilities you are using you should be able to boost the vehicle’s range by 62 miles in half-an-hour. Plug a two-battery model such as the one we drove into an 11kW AC charging point and it will take nine hours to elevate it from empty to full.

To help preserve its range, the eDaily can be brought to the right cabin temperature first thing in a morning prior to departure while still plugged into the charging socket.

Various power take-offs are available, with up to 50kW now on tap from the latest line-up. This turns the truck into a small power station.

Driving

In an unusual arrangement, and one we have not seen for many years, a keypad was displayed on the touchscreen, which required us to tap in a security code before we could start the vehicle.

Happily, it had been disabled, so all we needed to do was turn the starting key to the right, wait a few seconds, then turn it further to the right. Then we were ready to roll.

For a vehicle with such a long body, our eDaily’s handling turned out to be surprisingly good. It felt well-planted on the highway as we pushed it through several tight bends, showing no indication that it might break away and do its own thing to our detriment.

In urban areas the City Steering button proved to be a boon, allowing us to wriggle in and out of tight parking spaces with the minimum amount of effort by providing extra power assistance.

As for performance, a lot depends on which mode you select, and how worried you are about the remaining range you have in hand. The mode switch is next to the transmission lever.

If you want to feel as though you’ve just had rocket boosters put under you then opt for Power, but you’ll deplete the charge in the battery rapidly. Eco will conserve it, but you will start to slow markedly whenever you approach an incline.

We stuck with Eco as far as we could nevertheless, while occasionally resorting to Natural; a happy compromise between the other two. If you suddenly require a bit of on-highway punch then you can always employ the Hi-Power function, which delivers it promptly.

Unfortunately, the ride turned out to be a disappointment as we crashed from one ridge in the highway to the next thanks to the largely unforgiving suspension.

Our demonstrator arrived with a 375kg test load, and we put another 225kg in the back in the hope of calming things down. Our progress remained lumpy and bumpy alas, even on relatively smooth surfaces, but at least that made us slow down; and grab-handles (optional) on both of the A-pillars at least meant the passenger nearest the passenger door had something to hang on to.

We couldn’t help but wish our eDaily had come with Iveco’s optional AirPro air-suspension system to smooth out some of the bumps.

Returning to the subject of settings, you can pick from three different levels of regeneration by tapping the transmission lever to the left.

We opted for one-pedal driving as much as we could.

Functioning rather like a retarder on an urban bus, it slows you right down whenever you take your foot off the accelerator pedal, with no need to touch the brake pedal. At the same time it recovers energy that would otherwise be lost and pumps it into the battery.

Whichever setting we used, we did our best to keep the instrument panel dial showing how much power we were using in the green sector.

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