GM moved its electric van company BrightDrop over to Chevy in August to save some money, and today, the newly branded version of the vehicle is confirmed for one of BrightDrop’s earliest customers: Walmart.
Technology
Chevy’s BrightDrop electric vans will be in Walmart’s fleet by the end of the year
Walmart is rolling out its first Chevy Brightdrop 400 vehicles into its in-home delivery fleet after piloting the electric delivery vans.
After piloting BrightDrop 400 vehicles for customer deliveries, Walmart is officially adding them into its fleets. The company says its in-home delivery program is expanding to reach 62 million households nationwide and will roll out Chevy BrightDrops in Austin, Dallas, Denver, Detroit, northwest Arkansas, Orlando, and the San Francisco Bay area by the end of the year.
In an email to The Verge, GM North American business communications director Sabin Blake wrote that 150 BrightDrop vehicles are part of this new order (and not part of Walmart’s previous reservations). The initial vans will be current model year 2024, and later will ship with the new Chevy-branding.
Walmart had struck a deal with BrightDrop in 2022 to reserve 5,000 vans that included the larger 600 models (the number indicating the approximate square footage of cargo space). However, the retail giant seems to be sticking with the smaller 400 versions for now.
BrightDrop started as a wholly-owned subsidiary of GM and, in 2022, it was projected to bring in $1 billion in revenue with a 20 percent margin the following year. In 2023, BrightDrop’s CEO at the time Travis Katz came on Decoder and explained how BrightDrop ran like a startup company inside GM’s incubator and has an “ecosystem” of products surrounding the EV. It built dedicated teams that developed solutions like the Trace e-cart that containerizes and helps move packages from the van for easy door deliveries and the “Core” software suite to tie everything together.
However, sales have been slow for BrightDrop, and Katz left after the restructuring. Now under Chevy, BrightDrop has access to its dealer network to help sell both the van and software. CNBC reported in August that BrightDrop sold only 500 vans in 2023 and 746 of them through the first six months of 2024.
BrightDrop’s vans run on GM’s battery platform, formerly known as Ultium, and the larger version can drive an impressive 258.85 miles on a single charge (Verge transportation editor Andrew Hawkins literally napped inside one and can confirm).
Update November 1st: We’ve added new communication from GM about how many BrightDrops are in the latest Walmart sale.