IN Brief:
- CEFC will commit up to A$22m to support Zenobē’s acquisition of up to 148 battery electric trucks.
- The Foton T5 vehicles will be leased to Woolworths for last-mile grocery delivery.
- The rollout is scheduled for completion during 2027 and will cover New South Wales, Victoria, Queensland, Western Australia, and South Australia.
Clean Energy Finance Corporation will commit up to A$22m to support a large-scale deployment of battery electric trucks for Woolworths grocery deliveries in Australia.
The investment will help Zenobē Australia acquire up to 148 battery electric trucks for low-emission grocery delivery. The Foton T5 vehicles will be leased to Woolworths for last-mile operations across New South Wales and Victoria, with additional deployment planned in Queensland, Western Australia, and South Australia. The full rollout is expected to be completed during 2027.
Under the leasing model, Zenobē will retain ownership of the trucks, allowing Woolworths to deploy the vehicles during the lease term without taking on end-of-life risk. The lease package includes maintenance, warranties, and upgrades, creating a bundled operating structure around vehicle availability rather than a conventional truck purchase.
CEFC’s investment builds on earlier support for battery electric truck deployment with Zenobē and is focused on vehicle acquisition and leasing. Last-mile delivery is one of the more practical early segments for freight electrification because routes are usually predictable, vehicles can return to depot for charging, and utilisation profiles are easier to model than in long-haul freight.
Battery electric truck adoption in Australia remains low compared with passenger EV uptake. Of the 12,003 trucks and heavy vans sold in Australia in 2026 to date, only 0.9% were electric. Transport accounts for up to 23% of Australia’s national emissions, while road transport is projected to make up 83% of all transport emissions by 2035.
Julia Hinwood, Head of Infrastructure at CEFC, said the investment was intended to help bring battery electric trucks closer to price parity with diesel vehicles by supporting uptake and real-world operating data. Gareth Ridge, Country Director, Australia and New Zealand at Zenobē, said the project showed large-scale zero-emissions logistics was commercially viable and operationally proven.
The scale of the Woolworths deployment gives the market a more substantial operating reference than small fleet trials. A fleet of up to 148 vehicles can generate evidence on performance, downtime, charging cycles, battery degradation, driver acceptance, maintenance requirements, and route economics. Those data points will be critical as more operators move from demonstration vehicles into normal distribution schedules.
Residual value remains one of the harder questions in electric freight. Operators need confidence around battery life, replacement costs, maintenance profiles, resale values, and useful operating life before committing capital at scale. Leasing models can reduce that uncertainty for fleet users, although financiers and asset owners still need robust evidence that the vehicles can perform consistently in daily service.
Australian logistics decarbonisation is also moving beyond vehicle procurement. Climate resilience at port level, emissions data at booking level, and fleet transition are starting to sit in the same operational conversation. GeelongPort’s climate resilience work and booking-level Scope 3 freight data both show how emissions reduction is being pulled into infrastructure planning and transport decision-making rather than held at corporate reporting level.
Retail grocery delivery offers a strong early use case because network design can support depot charging and predictable mileage. Vehicles return to known locations, delivery windows are structured, and operators can plan charging around shift patterns. Those advantages do not remove constraints around grid capacity, charger installation, battery performance under load, maintenance capability, or peak-season route pressure.
The finance structure is also part of the shift. Instead of asking transport users to buy unfamiliar assets outright, the lease wraps capital cost, maintenance, warranty support, and upgrade risk into a service-led arrangement. That could make electrification more accessible for operators that want lower-emission vehicles but cannot absorb uncertainty around technology life cycles.
Australia’s road freight sector is operationally diverse, with metropolitan grocery delivery, regional linehaul, construction logistics, mining support, refrigerated freight, and parcel networks all requiring different range, payload, charging, and duty-cycle assumptions. The Woolworths rollout does not resolve every segment, but it gives the market a larger real-world reference point in one of the most practical early categories.
As larger retail and logistics fleets move beyond pilots, the test will be repeatability. Electric trucks need to be financed, charged, maintained, scheduled, and redeployed without weakening service levels. The CEFC-Zenobē-Woolworths model puts that question into a larger daily operating environment.
