Federal Express is looking for suppliers of advanced-technology vehicles that will help the firm cut its delivery trucks’ fuel use in half and their emissions by 90 percent. FedEx and a national environmental group, the Alliance for Environmental Innovation, have formed a project team in an effort to speed the production and use of environmentally improved pickup-and-delivery vehicles that have comparable peformance, cost, and utility to FedEx’s current fleet. The project seeks to have vehicle designs by the end of 2001, construction, durability testing, and prototype refining done by mide-2002, field tests of 10-50 pre-production models by mid-2003, and be able to buy production-level models by late 2004. The project will use as its baseline FedEx’s 1999-model truck, which has a cargo capacity of about 670 cubic feet and a 6,000-pound payload. Future vehicles must have a range of 400-plus miles and a cruising speed of at least 65 mph.