Most eight ton electric vehicles can only go around 60 miles, which is often not far enough to get from suburban delivery depots to city centers and back. However, Tevva's new diesel-electric hybrid has a much longer combined range of up to 250 miles. That's married with geofencing technology, which switches it to pure electric mode at predetermined borders for cities or ICE-free zones. When the truck leaves those zones and hits the highway, the system automatically switches on a small, efficient diesel motor to recharge. (That's not unlike how Chevy's discontinued hybrid Volt works, by the way.)

The fact that it's still polluting on highways isn't ideal, but it's a decent stopgap until EV batteries become cheaper and more energy-dense. UPS's UK division has taken delivery (as it were) of 15 of the vehicles, and will deploy them in Southampton and Birmingham to start with.