(Continued from page 1) In its current guise the EZ-Flex, which has a 3m³ load area and all-electric drivetrain, seems like a traditional, albeit shrunken, van. But Renault wants to address productivity as well as transportation and has to think about a range of stakeholders in the equation.

”The concept is very modular, such as preparing the parcels with draws,”  Le Vot continues. “The computer prepares packages and you switch containers. Does the van have to be big, does it have to be small? We will find out, because the driver will tell you ‘in Paris we don’t give a damn about size – we just park [in the road] so don’t waste time making it small’.But these are drivers telling us this; the city doesn’t say the same thing.”

Urban transportation increasingly requires zero-emission solutions and while future-proofing new models like the EZ-Flex with electric drivetrains goes some way to pre-empt the problem, Renault’s current portfolio is still very much geared towards internal combustion engines (ICE).

“For electrification, the market is not big, but we are big in the market – 42%,” Le Vot continues. What we are looking for is the transition between the classical ICE vehicle – which will not disappear in the short term – and the new demand.

But what is the new demand? A lot of people ask will you have an EV [version] of that one, a hybrid [version] of the other? We would probably take it the other way around and I would encourage you to see the EZ-Flex, looking at it as ‘what is the need that we have to fulfil in order to get an offer for this in the city last mile?’ London is completely different from Paris. Paris is completely different from [cities in] Italy.

So, we are going to make tests to see if it needs to be small, see if it needs to be flexible, see if it needs to have one driver, if it needs two drivers.

Only from that shall we get a new van for the future. In the meantime, we have an ICE range and an EV range and before going further we are going to study what will come next.”

With so many unknowns, it is hard for anyone to predict where demand, technology or even user needs will go, but Renault and Le Vot seem to be challenging the future and any preconceived notions of its future transportation needs.

“People don’t buy vehicles, they buy residual values and a total cost of ownership more than they do a vehicle,” says Le Vot. "The future of the electric LCV requires more than electrifying a platform – it requires assessing the size of the future vehicle. EZ-Flex may give us some hints on what we should do.”