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Comment by Quanttek | Hacker News Reader

In my hometown they (i.e. the small "Work" carrier) are carrying out mail for about a year now. Super small, silent, pretty good interior, though the "Work" only has a range of ~80km. That#s perfectly fine for urban areas but they will probably find little use in rural areas.

Some more background: A few years ago, the Post wanted to slowly transition to electric cars but couldn't find a car manufacturer (IIRC they asked Daimler and BMW) to produce an electric carrier even close to their specification so they basically said "fuck it" and founded their own little startup-like manufacturer

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I would assume that the 80km range was designed specifically to best match their needs. It is probably the optimal range for having the cheapest vehicle that can perform to their needs - and it might be more interesting for them to have more smaller districts anyway, as the storage capacity of the vehicle is another consideration.

I'd also guess that the vast majority of deliveries are in urban areas as opposed to rural ones (in Germany at least), so it makes sense to prioritise that.

Even more so if for all of the foreseeable future, nothing is keeping you from operating conventional cars in the outback. A large fleet, a well established distributed depot infrastructure, a very predictable route schedule focused around a few hours of each day. Perfect match for EV early adoption.

Also, Deutsche Post already uses (exclusively?) bicycles to deliver letters in cities. This would be the solution for heavier parcels.

Not exclusively. It seems to depend on the neighborhood. In some neighborhoods I've seen them using Renault Kangoos, which have a similar size compared to the StreetScooter Work.

Not entirely, StreetScooter was founded in 2010 and was bought by Deutsche Post in 2014.

So 'basic' electric vehicles have lower manufacturing hurdles to overcome?

No the vehicle has to fit their specs which are rather specific. Some specs are seemingly "low tec" in some areas but not in others. For example range:a lot of routes do not exceed 50 km but standard manufacturers cramp as much range as possible into their vehicles thus driving the weight and price up. A delivery vehicle like this does not need the range but good luck telling that your average car manufacturer who also has to think about other customers (who usually care a lot about range).

Then the vehicle has a hight floor making it back friendly for the delivery person which is something unwanted in your average delivery truck. It limits the height of the goods you can transport but the Post does not deliver packages that huge.

This is a special vehicle for a certain purpose and no commerial manufacturer had interest in developing something like this.

Sounds like an excellent opportunity for a customization of an existing vehicle.

not if existing vehicle is already more expensive than it needs to be, due to meeting non-requirements for DHL

They're charging 32000 euros for those things, that's a lot of budget to work with.

economics 101: they are selling them to third parties for that price (including some profit and negotiation margin). So they likely pay somewhere around 20-25k for internal use. That's ridiculously cheap for this kind of purpose built vessle.

Based on this report of what the USPS is asking to replace an ages-old design mail truck [1] ($30k per), EUR 25k sounds pretty dang good for a purpose built small-run pure-electric vehicle. I'd bet they could easily get the costs down to 15K EUR with appropriate volumes.

Maintenance costs on electric vehicles are a lot less, and obviously they don't use fuel, so that costs less too.

[1] http://voices.washingtonpost.com/federal-eye/2010/06/broken_...

They don't use fossil fuels, but they do need to be charged, and a fleet of them would need some added infrastructure to charge simultaneously. But that's a one-time cost, in the long run they should be cheaper to operate, clearly.

For an already customized version. Once you start by buying a stock electric vehicle you've already blown a large chunk of your budget.

http://business.citroen.nl/bedrijfswagens/citroen-berlingo-e...

Which leaves 8K to do the customization and would not require the capital investment, on top of that they would have a much higher resale value when no longer needed.

The largest model of that has less load volume than the smallest "Work" model. Customizing that is going to cost.

Modifying 10,000 vehicles will certainly require large capital investment.

Which hurdles? Electric vehicles are a solved problem. It's just the battery and the electronic to charge the battery were innovation is really needed to extend the reach. In NYC around 1910 all Cabs were full electric, the first official car of an Us president was an electric one. The post services in various countries used full electric cars up to the 1970s. Overall an electric vehicle has less parts and is simpler to design and produce. In China you see already many electric cars and even big Chinese built all electric SUVs. It seems like certain manufacturer of the old age will face reality very soon. There will be a disruption of the market, and they waited for decades and now they will loose a lot of market share.

And milk floats in the UK: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milk_float, https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/ethical-hipsters-are-driv....

Not really basic. It's being designed as an urban delivery vehicle, so built for lots of starts and stops, carrying a half a ton of cargo, and be able to maneuver city streets. Those sorts of conditions mean you're going to need a vehicle with a beefy chassis, beefy suspension, engine with a lot of torque and to be comfortable to get in and out of several dozen times a day. Those really aren't all that basic; you're building a freight platform with a wheelbase that's significantly smaller than the traditional freight vehicle. The US postal service is looking at building a similar vehicle to replace their iconic Grumman LLVs, and the entire cost of the program is expected to be into the billions of dollars. You'd be surprised how complicated "basic" can be.

"Hurdles" is too ambiguous and vague. I think the issue was cost and not application of existing technologies.

If specs do not require for a 800km autonomy, max speed of 170km/h and no leather seats, no auto-pilot, no high-end stereo system, and so on, then yes ("money" or lack of IT is a big "hurdle".. no?)

The Post can make an objective decision about how much range they actually need, while regular carmakers have to built range vastly higher than most buyers will ever use, because those buyers will worry about whether they'll need it once a year.

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