LOS ANGELES — Door to Door Valet Cleaners has been running pickup and delivery routes across the Los Angeles coastline for 35 years. Now those routes are running on batteries.
The company, which operates 10 locations from the Palos Verdes Peninsula to Malibu and east to Beverly Hills, West Hollywood and Brentwood, recently converted its delivery fleet to electric vehicles. It’s a big service territory, and pickup and delivery accounts for roughly half the company’s business.
“The electric fleet fits directly into our sustainability outlook,” says CEO Sajid Veera. “As a business, our biggest carbon footprint comes from the emissions created by our routes, whether they are delivering to people’s homes or deliveries that are going from our central cleaning lab to our drop stores. When you add the carbon emissions, it probably is in the thousands of tons annually.”
Eliminating tailpipe emissions from that operation, Veera says, was a natural extension of the company’s sustainability commitments, which include GreenEarth cleaning and Green Business Bureau certification.
Pack It Out
Veera and his brother grew up in the Boy Scouts, and Veera says one principle stuck.
“Whenever we went camping, the adage drilled into our minds was pack out what you brought in and leave the campsite cleaner than when you came in,” he says. “We’ve tried to embed that ethos into our business at all levels.”
His daughter picked it up, too. Veera remembers a family trip to Prasonisi, a Greek island where Mediterranean and Aegean currents collide and pile ocean plastic on the shore.
“I was there when my daughter was 6 or 7 years old, and she actually wanted to pick up all of the trash on the beach,” Veera says. “I told her that’s not possible, but we spent some time there just to make her happy, and it was a life lesson. We basically spent a couple of hours picking up plastic trash.”
A few years later, she saw a pile of dry cleaning delivered to the house in plastic garment bags.
“She was like, ‘Dad, this is ridiculous. Look at how much plastic this is,’” Veera says. “It’s always the younger generation drilling and saying, ‘Hey, this isn’t right.’”
Veera and his brother each have three children, and they participate in environmental activities such as beach cleanups on Earth Day.
“There is no mandated or regulatory burden from the authorities to electrify our fleet,” Veera says. “The reason we chose to electrify was to be good stewards of our environment. We want to look at what we’re leaving behind for the next generation.”
That thinking applies to the fleet, too — specifically, what happens to EV batteries once the vans are done.
“Replacing the battery is ridiculously expensive. It’s actually more expensive sometimes than what the car would cost,” he says. “But I figured if we get 10 years, hopefully between now and then, they will have figured out how to recycle batteries and not just have them end up in landfills.”
Testing Drive First
Veera started the process of switching to EVs personally.
“I was skeptical about electric vehicles,” he says, “so, as a test, I bought an electric personal car at the beginning of 2025 to see just how it functions and what to expect.”
He drove the vehicle for six months, getting to know what the charging was like, what ‘range anxiety’ felt like and where the potential hassles were.
“I’m one of those people who always would have my gas at 100%,” he says. “If there’s an emergency, what do you do?”
He didn’t want his drivers walking into that blind. Once he was comfortable with the technology, he bought two electric vans and put them on Door to Door’s Malibu and Beverly Hills routes.
The drivers ran them for three months. The company watched the numbers — charging times, battery usage and daily mileage range. Only after the pilot confirmed the vans could handle real-world routes did Veera commit to converting the full fleet.
“We placed an order and electrified the entire fleet after the three-month beta test within our own organization,” he says.
Come back Tuesday for the conclusion of this series, where we’ll examine the vehicles in Door to Door’s electric fleet, and some of the surprises Veera and his drivers discovered after the switch.
Have a question or comment? E-mail our editor Dave Davis at [email protected].
