If you grew up in the UK, your oldest memory of electric vehicles is likely to be milk floats – those slow, crude, whining vehicles that trundled around residential streets in the early hours of the morning.

Many of those milk floats were built by Smith Electric Vehicles – the same company that has now gone into partnership with Ford to produce all-electric versions of the Transit Connect van. The company name may be the same – but the vehicles are a million miles apart, as this first drive report from the Re*Move blog shows.

The Re*Move team got to drive the first production electric Transit Connect that came off the Smith Electric Vehicles production line – you can read much more about their first impressions here. They have also written a general guide on driving electric vehicles, which is interesting reading.

Both articles are well worth a read and illustrate just how much potential there is for using electric vans on low mileage work – in towns and on set routes. So-called range anxiety is irrelevant in these circumstances, which may well give electric vans a head start over electric cars – hybrids will probably be a more popular option in the car market for the near future.