B-ON Pelkan must make parcel delivery a breeze

Chances are you haven’t heard of B-ON before and we certainly won’t blame you, because the company was only founded in 2020. It operates from Luxembourg and flew its first model, the Pelkan, to Las Vegas for the CES. There it not only shows the Pelkan, but also a smart system for parcel deliverers.

We’ll focus on that first, because that’s actually the most interesting. B-ON talks about a system that ‘can generate as much as 9,000 dollars (€8,200) in additional delivery revenue per vehicle per year’. That sounds promising. What’s so smart about it? Well, at the back of the Pelkan there is a kind of carousel where you place the packages and scanners register the addresses on them when loading them. Then you drive your route. With GPS, the carousel then determines when you are stationary somewhere which package you logically want to deliver and turns that side towards the delivery hatch on the side of the Pelkan. You open the hatch and voilà, the package is ready to grab (among several other packages). So you no longer have to load it yourself or manually dig through your entire load looking for the package.

Here you can see how the carousel containing the packages is placed in the Pelkan. The delivery hatch is at the bottom.

It sounds useful, but the question remains how much this system will cost and how much space it will take up. We can imagine that you can take fewer packages with you than normal in an open loading area. Various specifications of the B-ON Pelkan itself are already known: it should be launched on the market with battery packs with a capacity of 43 kWh or 54 kWh and with the latter it is expected to have a range of just under 300 km. The maximum loading weight is 1,320 kilos. Now we just have to wait and see how much loading volume there is or how many packages are in the smart dispenser be able to. The B-ON Pelkan should be launched on the market this year and B-ON already has a Dutch website. We’ll probably hear more soon.