An electric refrigerated vehicle is a delivery truck or van where a battery pack, not a diesel engine, supplies power to both the wheels and the refrigeration unit cooling the cargo box. Older electric trucks still ran a separate diesel powered fridge unit bolted to the front of the box. A fully electric reefer draws both jobs from the same pack, or from a second smaller battery dedicated to the refrigeration unit and charged alongside the main one. The cargo box itself is unchanged: the same insulated panels, doors and air chute as a diesel version, holding whatever temperature band, frozen, chilled or 2-8°C, the load requires. Sizes range from a small urban van doing single pallet drops to a full size straight truck or trailer running multi stop city routes.
The vehicle sits in the same fleet as any other unit doing refrigerated-road-transport. The difference is entirely in what powers the cooling, not how the cooling itself works.
Splitting one battery between driving and cooling
Refrigeration draws power constantly, whether the truck is moving, parked at a delivery bay, or sitting in traffic. The drive motor only draws power when the wheels turn. On a diesel reefer that split barely matters, because the fridge unit carries its own separate fuel tank. On a battery electric truck, both loads draw from one finite pack, so every kilowatt hour spent holding a frozen box at temperature during a long stop is a kilowatt hour the drive motor cannot use later in the route. A route with many stops and long door open periods, the exact profile of a multi drop delivery run, costs more range than a fast highway leg between two points, even at the same total distance.
The range cost of cooling load
Cooling a deep frozen box costs meaningfully more energy than a chilled one, and an ambient dry box costs almost nothing beyond drag and weight. That difference shows up directly in how far the vehicle can go on a charge: a frozen multi drop route eats into range faster than a chilled equivalent, and a hot summer day or a cold winter one both push the compressor and the cabin climate control harder than a mild one. Fleet operators size the battery and plan the route against the worst case combination of load, stops and weather, not the average day, because running out of charge with a frozen delivery still on board is a failure the diesel version never had to plan around.
Urban low-emission zones
Cities that restrict or charge diesel vehicles entering a defined zone are the clearest current use case. An electric reefer produces no tailpipe emissions and, depending on the compressor design, runs markedly quieter than a diesel unit, which also opens up early morning or overnight delivery windows in residential areas where noise rules would block a diesel truck. That combination, zone access plus quiet running, is why electric reefers have concentrated first on dense urban last-mile-cold-chain delivery: grocery, foodservice and parcel routes built from a depot to nearby stops, rather than long haul lanes between distribution centers.
Depot charging as the constraint
An electric reefer only works if it can charge somewhere between shifts, which in practice means a depot with enough electrical capacity and enough chargers for the whole fleet, not just one truck. Adding reefer trucks to a depot built for ordinary vans can mean a grid connection upgrade before the vehicles themselves are the limiting factor. Fast charging mid route exists but is rare for reefers today, so most operate on a single overnight charge and a fixed daily range budget, planned the way a route planner would budget fuel, except the tank cannot be topped up mid shift the way a diesel tank can. Depot layout matters too: a charger sitting idle behind a parked trailer, or a yard with more trucks than plug points, turns a fleet's on paper range into a scheduling problem before a single vehicle leaves for its route.
The duty cycle limit today
Long haul, multi day routes and lanes with sparse charging infrastructure remain outside what a current electric reefer covers well. The battery needed for that range and cooling load, at today's energy density, adds weight and cost that erode the payload advantage the truck would otherwise carry. Extreme cold climates cut range further, from both the added cooling load, in this case cabin and box heating, and reduced battery performance at low temperatures. For those routes, a diesel or hybrid unit remains the more reliable choice, and most fleets running electric reefers today deploy them on defined regional routes with a known stop count and a return to the same depot each night, not as a replacement for the whole fleet. Onboard real-time-temperature-monitoring matters even more here, since a stalled or underpowered unit needs to be caught the moment it happens, not at the next stop. Some electric units also switch to natural-refrigerants such as CO2 for the refrigeration circuit itself, pairing a lower emissions power source with a lower emissions refrigerant.