Todd Woody, Forbes Staff I cover environmental and green
technology issues from San Francisco. Those ubiquitous white,
blue and orange FedEx delivery trucks are getting greener. On
Wednesday, the first of nine electric trucks were set to roll
out of a FedEx distribution center in Silicon Valley. By year’s
end 34 of the $150,000 Navistar E-Star lithium-ion battery-
powered vehicles will be dispatched throughout the San Francisco
Bay Area, joining 53 other electric trucks in cities across the
U.S. FedEx is also rolling out electric trucks in London, Paris,
Hong Kong, Berlin and Florence. “It’s a sizable investment,”
Keshav Sondhi, manager of FedEx’s asset management group for
global vehicles, said Tuesday at FedEx’s cavernous Menlo Park
facility where nine of the futuristic E-Star trucks were lined
up. The deployment of electric trucks is part of an initiative
to increase the fuel economy of FedEx’s 40,000-vehicle fleet by
20% over a baseline set in 2005. To date, FedEx has achieved a
16.6% improvement. “First,