I often read comments in your Saturday column referring to problems with particulate filters on diesel-engined road vehicles. In view of your obvious knowledge of these problems, I would guess you would be interested in comments made by Mike Payette, Manager for fleet equipment at Staples, the office supplies company in the US, during an interview published in the "Work Truck Online" magazine. Here, he was comparing the differences between operating diesel-engined vehicles and their recent addition of 41 Smith, Newton, electric delivery trucks to their US fleet of 2000 vehicles. This is an interesting extract from the interview.

"The shorter routes are actually more harmful for the diesels. We found that with some of our diesels in the L.A. Market, we'll pull a download off the engine control module (ECM) and find the ECM called for a regeneration of the diesel particulate filter (DPF) 119 times, but was only able to complete the re-Gen three times because the vehicle was not running long enough for the 20 minutes required to clean that filter out".