Why the new USPS mail trucks look so weird | Hacker News Reader

Why the new USPS mail trucks look so weird

thedrive.com

265 pointsminding377 comments

It's interesting that "cost" is the reason given for why these vehicles aren't electric, but... how could that be? Batteries for electric carmakers are not that expensive any more, maybe $150/kWh.

LLVs are currently horrendously inefficient (fleet average of about 9mpg). They have a ~13 gallon tank for a range of about 120 miles. They drive about 18 miles a day on average (total fleet average, so some are idle and probably the typical route is 45 miles, but 18 miles is good for our purposes) and burn 2 gallons of gas. At $3/gallon, that's about $6 a day in fuel costs (and let's ignore brakes and oil changes). We could put a 75kWh battery in that thing, easily get 250 mile range (double the range of what the LLV is). For an efficiency of about 3.33 miles per kWh, and an average commercial electricity price of 11 cents per kWh, that's 59 cents per day in electricity cost. So every day, the electric one would save $5.40 in fuel costs (net).

Even with that generous 75kWh battery, you're talking just 6 years for it to pay for the electric battery to pay for itself in fuel costs vs the old vehicle. And these things are designed to last for multiple decades, plus this will drastically reduce oil changes and brake servicing costs. Are they really that cash strapped they'll ignore something that can save them that much? The US federal government definitely isn't strapped for cash. Does this really boil down to punitive fiscal requirements for the USPS put on by Congress and DeJoy? Because if so, that's inexcusable.

Or perhaps no one bid a competitively low price for an electric powertrain?

Maybe the charging infrastructure isn't available?

A literal 120V exterior outlet? 83% of these vehicles drive in the city. They drive on average 18 miles a day (typical routes being about 45 miles). You don't need a 150kW Supercharger station, you just need a 1.2kW regular old 120V exterior outlet used for trimming the bushes. Even a cheap RV hookup would be overkill.

If a federal government agency in the most powerful national on the planet can't take the most obvious step toward electrification in a case which is the best possible situation for an electric vehicle (very stop and go traffic, slow speeds, short routes, long total miles on odometer over life of vehicle), what hope does the rest of the world have in taking action on climate?

Greta Thunberg is right. People don't care about climate. Literally everything else is a priority.

Yes, there are probably very few outlets where mail trucks currently park. These things are parked in the middle of parking lots, not in garages. And you need more than one outlet, you need one for every truck that parks there. And I am sure no current USPS office has power service hooked up for several hundred amps of draw that was never anticipated to be used.

There's no way to do a project this big without phasing it in. The USPS has many tens of thousands of buildings.

These vehicles ARE being phased in slowly. And installing 100-200 Amps of commercial service is cheap, and I actually think would largely be unnecessary as they can be set to charge at night when office demand is super low.

Does the electric code permit overallocation in that case? That's not my area of expertise but I doubt it does.

And yes, installing service is "cheap" but it takes time.

It takes way less time than building these vehicles will and can be done cheaply with local electricians. It’s strange how common magical thinking about EVs is, like electricity is this newfangled thing that we don’t understand and need massively new, poorly understood infrastructure. We don’t. And that’s a huge advantage.

I am not saying and have not said electricity is the hard part. The logistics of steering the world's highest volume postal operation (with financial issues as it stands) is the hard part. The USPS handles 43% of the world's mail. There are no projects of this size that aren't phased in, which is apparently what they are doing. Some of these vehicles will be electric, so it stands to reason that they will also be building out the equipment and processes required to roll them out.

Except these vehicles are not going to be immediately dumped onto all USPS parking lots. They are going to be built over a period of years. Adding an outlet for each vehicle would cost on the order of 1% of the vehicle cost and would be paid for in fuel savings within a couple months.

Look, I don't know where this idea came from that electricity is this hard problem. It's not. As it is now, many of these LLVs have to be fueled sometimes multiple times per week. Simply plugging into an external outlet not only is cheap but will actually save time.

People who do not have electric cars keep looking for an inventing some kind of "gotcha," but they really are this easy. You literally can just use a normal external outlet to charge them, and even if you want faster charging (totally unnecessary and probably undesirable for this application), it costs maybe $1200 to get an RV hookup (equivalent to L2). I charge from an old dryer outlet, although sometimes use an exterior 120V. It really is that easy. In fact, I don't know if big USPS locations have refueling depots like bus depots do, but if they went electric, they'd be unnecessary and could be removed.

Parking spaces in the US are, by and large, not commonly populated with dryer outlets or RV hookups. This is a common issue that affects EV adoption, particularly when people lease the property where they park their car.

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/16/business/electric-cars-ci...

You are entirely correct that the concept of an electrical outlet is not difficult. Commercial real estate is a bit harder, however.

Bear in mind that this contract is for a company to build trucks, and what you describe would be work that is out of scope anyway. The current fleet is way past its replacement date, and needed to be replaced about 10 years ago already. The USPS has funding issues at the moment and it is entirely possible that they cannot afford to do everything at once.

While you claim that it is "1% of the vehicle cost", I think some quick math would indicate that there's no way this is right. 4.8 million dollars to retrofit 40,000 locations for EV charging? That's $120 per station. You won't even be able to pull a work permit for $120.

$482 million is just the first payment. They're not making the vehicles for $12k each.

And while 1% is too optimistic, you'd presumably install multiple outlets at a time.

1% of the 6 billion total estimate sounds like it's in the ball park.

But that's an expected expenditure over 10 years, and you have to have the ability to charge before you can use the vehicles. That's probably another important factor, because LLVs are past their expiration date now. You're right that it makes sense to upgrade an entire facility's electricals at once. That's almost certainly what will happen over the course of the rollout, but the need for replacing LLVs is likely evenly distributed among locations.

I still don't understand your point. For your argument to be valid, you'd have to assert that a factory can build new mail trucks faster than you could add charging points.

There will be one factory pumping out cars on a specialised, serial production line. It will be competing with 30 thousand locations operating in parallel.

It’s an issue of distribution.

LLVs are past their expiration date everywhere and likely need replaced all over the country. But, it doesn’t make sense to add charging capability ad hoc for a single parking space in a lot when a new vehicle is sent out - the marginal cost of each space is not linear — you’d retrofit an entire parking lot at one time.

If 10 locations have 10 existing vehicles each, and all of them need to replace one failing LLV, going 100% electric for new vehicles means you need 10 vehicles but a retrofit for 100 parking spaces. It does not make sense to tear up a parking lot every year for one new vehicle over the next 10 years.

You wouldn’t replace mail trucks individually, you would fully transition each location as a unit.

Also, you overestimate the complexity of installing charging points. In many cases the parking will be directly against the post office building. In many cases you would only have to dig a small trench. In some cases you would string up a new overhead wire. When you’re doing 10 at a time, this isn’t complicated or expensive on a per vehicle basis.

Many of these buildings are not owned by the USPS. Many of these buildings do not have adequate electrical right now. USPS has 30k buildings.

Paying someone to build vehicles is much different than retrofitting buildings, each in a different jurisdiction, in many cases that you do not own, to allow plugging in a huge number of vehicles in all sorts of weather conditions - in the middle of often uncovered parking.

It's just not that hard. I charge in uncovered driveway. With an exterior outlet. In the winter or summer, doesn't matter. It's simply not that hard.

Do you also run a national mail delivery business?

It seems like the right way to charge a fleet of vehicles if your site has limited power is to have some central device that coordinates charging rates, so that together they only pull as much current as is available. You could also set priorities. That way you can install as many charge ports as you want, and just have to worry about whether you have enough power to charge all your vehicles every day.

I don't know if that sort of setup is commonly done or is allowed by code.

A 100 vehicle fleet would require not 100-200 Amps service, but 1500 Amp service, and that's a whole different problem.

Outlier locations will have outlier problems. That's not necessarily something to be worried about.

The average post office has six delivery vehicles if I did the math right.

I am in a small town, with one post office for 40k residents. We have approximately 20 mail trucks.

Well, you've probably got 14 to 16 hours of time to phase that charge across your fleet. You're still going to need a lot of outlets, but you only need to feed power to 20-25% of them at a time.

In many locations the charging window is going to be a lot smaller than you think with longer routes and later deliveries pushing parts of the fleet into sub-10 hour charging windows. Now you have a need to shuffle power and charging across this local fleet in the middle of the night. Who exactly is going to be doing this? If you are automating it then you are making some very large bets on the charging infrastructure being 100% reliable.

It is a problem that sounds simple at first but becomes more complex when you actually dig into the details. A fleet that is ICE-ready on day one but which can be retrofitted to EV means that you are able to deploy something that works now and pick locations to test EV and all of the details that are involved in the process by doing partial upgrades as various locations. Overall, sounds like current plan is the smart one.

A) The USPS is not technically a government agency. B) They're pretty strapped for funding right now.

I think the USPS actually is a government agency—from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Postal_Service#G...:

> The USPS is often mistaken for a state-owned enterprise or government-owned corporation (e.g., Amtrak) because it operates much like a business. It is, however, an "establishment of the executive branch of the Government of the United States", (39 U.S.C. § 201) as it is controlled by presidential appointees and the postmaster general.

One outlet is certainly fine, 100 outsets, not so much.

Just putting this out there.."Adapting a lamp post into a charging point for electric vehicles can cost as little as £2,000" Seems like a good infrastructure project ...

2000 pounds? Try $200 maybe. And these vehicles cost on the order of $40k. Penny wise and pound foolish to spend thousands of dollars on a combustion engine and drivetrain just because you're afraid of a $200 exterior outlet.

$200 won’t even cover the cost of the electrician’s labor. And beyond just the cost of materials and labor to actually do the thing, consider the cost of the consultation on what is actually possible for a given location, the time and cost of permitting, the time involved in all the paperwork such as the drafting and filing of the plans, etc. This isn’t and informal process like some exterior facing outlet you decide to add to your home as a weekend project after looking up a YouTube video and doing a Home Depot run.

Then there’s all the aggregate costs associated with switching. Maintenance of an EV requires different skills and different tooling. Establishing new or amending existing maintenance contracts, training new mechanics or retraining old ones, rewriting guidelines, purchasing new tools and equipment, etc. Many hundreds of thousands of dollars of costs per region.

And you’re going to do that across far-flung areas of the US, many which have a current EV install base near or at zero?

They have to work to transition this across tens of thousands of locations, while not jeopardizing the delivery of hundreds of millions of pieces of mail a day. And you’re going to suggest that they NOT take a slow phased approach? To transition one of the largest fleets of vehicles in the world?

Please. Consider for a moment you may be wrong. That things are not as simple as you think. That when every single person is trying to explain why, you shouldn’t automatically attempt to find ways to dismiss or invalidate what they have to say.

from the other linked article:

> While some will be EVs, some of the NGDVs will come with modern, fuel-efficient internal combustion engines. As electric vehicle infrastructure improves, these NGDVs will be able to be retrofitted with the battery-electric powertrain later on.

That doesn't make any sense. All the "electrical infrastructure" needed to drive the typical 45 mile route is a regular old 120V exterior outlet. The retrofit cost is going to probably be double the marginal cost it would've been to just make it electric in the first place.

Whoever is making these decisions either wasn't given competitive bids or they're poorly informed about electric vehicles.

I suspect there is a high level of variance in both the length of different routes and the availability of power in parking areas for mail trucks.

Grumman LLVs only have a 120 mile range. This is already double. And sure, maybe you’ll want an RV style outlet (also pretty cheap) in case of 5% of vehicles where 120V wouldn’t be enough.

The LLV can refuel in 5 minutes at over 160,000 public locations.

It sure can!

That's also much much more flexibility than it needs. For a low-mileage fleet vehicle it's deep into diminishing returns.

As I pointed out in another thread about these vehicals, the USPS still operates mule trains, hovercraft and helicopters for some deliveries. That's the most extreme examples, and I imagine there are many journeys that are somewhere between in terms of range and difficulty. People have a very narrow view of the world and forget that not everywhere is urban or suburban, or even just farming country levels of density. The USPS has to service them all.

How long will it take to recharge these hundreds of vehicles, and who will be around to take them out of their charging stations and move in a new vehicle?

Electric vehicles are great but at scale, the issues around charging them daily are very real. It works for a single homeowner, but if a post office has 100(?) trucks, and it takes 2 hours to charge, someone needs to be there to keep track of them, unless you expect 100 charging stations.

You don’t need a “charging station,” you just need an outlet. And you don’t need someone to “charge” them except the person who parked it. It charges at night after use. An exterior outlet costs almost nothing compared to the fully burdened cost of a parking space.

Of all the “very real” problems with electric vehicles, you picked two or three things that aren’t.

At most post offices the trucks are parked outside without electrical outlets nearby. Sure those can be built but it will take a while. In many cases the circuit supplying the facility will have to be upgraded.

Any parking lot with lamp posts has electricity. Takes way less time to install an exterior outlet than it does to build a vehicle.

Are you implying that circuit driving the lamp posts can handle multiple 15A load?

You'd be surprised how much load runs through a chain of streetlights. 3phase/400V and they pull heavy duty conductors through the conduit. Could definitely handle multiple 120v/15A equivalents (but it'd be way cheaper and more effective to pull dedicated conduit + conductor)

also: In my city (in UK) the lamp posts date from a long time ago. Only a few years ago all the sodium lamps were replaced by lower power LEDs, which presumably means that much of the cabling is now massively redundant.

Correct, which is why they're installing lamp post EV chargers

Don't underestimate the efficiency of old-fashioned sodium lamps, they're pretty close to that of LEDs from what I understand. I think part of the reason places are so keen to install LED streetlights is that on paper they have a much longer lifespan than the bulbs in the sodium lamps they're replacing. Also, they're more modern and everyone knows how efficient they are.

Low pressure sodium vapor lamps are also very yellow [1], whereas a modern LED is much more broad-spectrum and thus looks nicer.

Unfortunately, it does mean that LED lamps are a greater hazard for light pollution.

[1] Low-pressure sodium vapor lamp spectrum: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sodium-vapor_lamp#/media/File:...

interesting, perhaps the new design for the lamp covers is part of it but in my direct experience from a boat there is massively less light pollution with the LEDs which shine downwards only and show in a town on the side of the hill as a set of twinkling fairy lights and in a city over the hill as not much at all whereas the sodium lights produce an orange glow which can be seen for 20 miles or more at night. However, that doesn't say anything about the frequency which could of course be more damaging locally even if it scatters less.

Those lamp posts aren't close to every space.

Are you going to run extension cords for the 150+ feet to each outlying vehicle? No?

Then you have to tear up asphalt to lay down new lines. That's not cheap, especially with a USPS that's so strapped for money right now (for political reasons).

1. Do they park at the same place every night?

2. Do they have to install electrical charging to all possible parking space?

3. Are these installation paid by government or the USPS?

4. Are those installation done on government property? Or on private property? Do the owner agree to do so?

5. Miles and Maintenance / TCO flavour Electric in these usage?

6. Insurance?

If you have more than one vehicle that you need to charge, you need more than one outlet. Worse, you cannot just get connect all of them to one outlet through daisy chained extension cords: you need separate 120V circuit for each vehicle. Even if you are lucky enough to have multiple outlets around where you park your fleet, these will likely all be on the same circuit.

This problem is of course solvable, you need to build a charging station. The point is that you need more than "just an outlet".

Nope. You only need a 15A branch per vehicle. You can install a 30A branch, too, if you like, and two poles of those are enough for 4 vehicles. For slow charging purposes, 120V exterior outlets are more than good enough and have commonly been used for government electric vehicles for decades.

Slow charging may not be fast enough. Around here, I'll sometimes see them making (mostly) parcel deliverys as late as 9PM, and then they're out in the morning at 4 or 5AM.

Those areas should splurge for fast charging then. Plenty of areas could get by with slow charging though.

I think if a parking area has many vehicles in one place it might be easier to move the charging infrastructure around them. I’d assume that can be done easier than moving refuelling infrastructure. So maybe 100 vehicles could have 10 charging widgets on wheels with cords to their base point, 2 people to hook up and move to the next one that is done.

Just put a power outlet - only minimally more beefy than a normal wall socket - at each parking lot. Over night, they are easily charged no need to move them around.

There's quite a bit more charging overhead for 110 vs 220.

Also, there are 30,000 post offices. I'd imagine it will be a long process, even if they just put in 110. one evse requires large amounts of continuous current, let alone with a parking lot full of vehicles.

You're assuming that vehicles are charged disparately, rather than having several vehicles charging in tandem in the lot behind the post office.

120V is tremendously inefficient when converting to DC. 220V is a little less so but it's better to have other means of charging.

It seems like you are comparing a theoretical modern EV to the terrible efficiency of the old LLV. They didn’t choose to continue buying the old LLV, they are buying a vehicle with a new ICE. So the comparison makes little sense.

Repair and maintenance are probably far more expensive than the gas costs, especially as a government contract. Gas prices will also increase as demand falls of a cliff over the coming decade.

Electric wins on all fronts in cost, simplicity, and city health

I doubt maintenance & repair costs be more expensive for an ICE engine. The actual engine part requires little maintenance: occasional oil changes each year, spark plugs every five years, and maybe a belt in 10 years? I guess brake pads might be more common, but those are still a once every few years thing and inexpensive.

All other common repair items would the same for an EV: suspension, various ball and CV joints, tires, AC, body damage, sensors, bushings, etc

I sometimes try to find an article I’m sure I read here at hacker news. It said something to the effect that the top ten wearables on a ICE car, measured by revenue in the auto shop market, don’t even exist on an electrical vehicle.

Well that’s hard to believe, unless you pedantically itemize every tiny little thing. For example, a single oil change typically requires a new oil filter, a new crush washer on the drain plug, oil, possible additives, and sometimes an air filter swap. So that’s five items right there, but we’re still talking only 20 minutes of work and $50 of maintenance.

Ye ... my experience with old cars is that the ICE is not the main time or money sink.

Thinks like drive axis, suspension parts, wheel bearings, brakes etc is common with EVs - and those fall apart.

The timing and generator belt headache is replaced by two selfdriven motors/pumps on EVs for the oil or water cooling system and servo. Hardly less mentainance and more expensive parts.

The main thing is that most EVs are new so most have not had their exposed systems beaten out of spec and turned into rust yet, I assume.

Smooth delivery of power has surprising downstream effects. The wear on ball joints and tyres for EVs can be significantly less due to not having as much jerk (derivative of acceleration) from their motor.

Wear on tires and ball joints are more due to increased weight and high torque from zero RPM.

https://www.fleetowner.com/equipment/tires/article/21147010/...

Not sure why you thought otherwise.

Cited article is about _potential_ torque loads and the need to design for it, and does not address light duty typical use case for mail delivery.

Jerk causes chatter (slippage) between parts and can significantly reduce designed life. Electric motors are amazing at smoothing out discontinuities. Nokian has stated EVs are easier on tyres for this reason.

In this case for short-distance batteries I estimate battery pack mass of 150kg more than ICE equipment. Increased mass would not have a major impact on ball joints and tyres, these loads will be designed in.

There are literally hundreds of sources you could find for how EVs have worse wear.

I have no idea what you're on about with "chatter" without specifying any specific part of a drivetrain...

Like your whole comment reads like someone trying to apply extremely general theoretical concern while handwaving away actually connecting it to practical application...

And where are you getting the idea that:

a) the weight difference will only be 150kg. These things can end up doing 50 miles with a heavily loaded truck in high heat. They'll need the same cooling systems the ICE does, they'll need battery packs over-provisioned to meet their 25 year life span mandate.

b) even 150kg wouldn't increase weight. I don't know what you think "designed in" means. It means either make the parts beefier so that they can withstand greater wear before replacement, or it means replace parts more... neither option erases the problem.

ICE or EV obviously they're going to design the suspension to handle the curb weight + occupants and cargo but adding to the curb weight will have the result of making something more expensive. Doesn't really matter if you're paying for it upfront or later, you're paying for it.

My Spec Miata's suspension alignment was designed with my weight in mind and literally every pound counts. Even the weight of the gas in the tank opposite me can have a noticeable effect on how the suspension sits, which in turn affects tires wear.

The same thing plays out on a "normal" car in much slower motion

My comment only addressed wear on components, and specifically mentioned tyres and ball joints. I am not making a statement on upfront costs. I’m also not considering behavioural changes of users when switching to electric motors.

There is no reason an efficient ICE can't have cheaper maintenance than an EV.

In this day and age, reliable ICE drivetrains are pretty much a solved issue if you're not trying to make tons of horsepower (which they're not)

Most of the maintenance with a modern ICE has nothing to do with the drivetrain. Tires, brakes, suspension components, filters, all things that EVs still have (brakes get a respite from regen, but the extra weight takes the savings back for the tires).

Oil changes with modern synthetics and low performance demands can be 15k+ apart.

Then there's the fact you can get an ICE drivetrain repaired anywhere and fuel up anywhere.

The cost of building up a repair and charging infrastructure alone would probably have killed any savings.

This is not an anti-EV post, but it is an anti-antiquated-ideas-about-ICE post.

> brakes get a respite from regen

The brake cylinders might seize instead. The pads and disks are quite cheap to replace.

How many private cars actually change brake systems because of braking too much and not environment attrition.

Decreased demand would tend to result in reduced prices, not increased prices.

The laws of supply and demand only work that way if supply is limited, which is very often not the case. A lot of production benefits from economies of scale, where fixed overheads are dwarfed by unit costs. In such cases, decreased demand results in reduced production, which results in the loss of economies of scale as production overheads remain the same or similar, thereby increasing in magnitude relative to unit costs.

Maybe it costs ten gajillion dollars to produce one litre of petrol, but twenty gajillion dollars to produce one bazillion litres of petrol.

We are thousands of times over capturing economies of scale in gas production, we support thousands of independent drilling and refining sites.

Only instantaneously. In the long term supply decreases to meet decreased (now niche) demand which decreases duty cycle on operations, hence increasing per unit cost.

Refined petroleum products will certainly not be niche within a decade. So much of global transportation simply can't swap out ICE with electric now, or in many cases ever. Huge swaths of the globe lack the electrical grid infrastructure to entertain even small moves in that direction. And huge numbers of drivers in countries with adequate infrastructure can't plug in at home due to living in apartment complexes, urban street parking, etc. Electric transport is a great growth area but it will not make gasoline niche any time soon.

More likely the decreasing cost of electric transportation options will have downward competitive price pressure on gasoline.

I have seen one concern expressed as potential imbalance in demand for different refined components. For example, if demand for diesel were to hold steady, but for gasoline diminish, to some degree gasoline potentially becomes a leftover pollutant.

> They drive about 18 miles a day on average

The LLVs don't drive for an hour a day and sit in the parking lot turned off for 23 hours a day. Many routes might be 6 hours or more. You need vehicles that have AC or heat and the ability to run for an entire day. The differential cost for such a vehicle is not the cost of a battery. I'm not saying the current purchasing process is waste-free, but you need to use realistic numbers.

The longest route is about 185 miles in Phillipsburg, KS. There are averages, medians, and modes, none of which are the right numbers. The average isn't as important as probable mileage.

For example, say a bus carries a maximum of 80 people. When 10 people get on your bus, your costs aren't 12%.

Carriers on many rural routes use their own vehicles. My parent's carrier drives a Subaru Outback

I hadn't even contemplated that. Thank you. That's an important use case.

Even a 75kWh battery would be expensive and heavy, and probably overkill in this case. If 100 miles of range is more than enough for most routes for the day, then something like 30kWh might be more reasonable.

Also one might be able to keep costs down by optimizing for cost rather than energy density. LiFeP04 cells have been comparatively expensive, but it seems price has been dropping lately. It's also a good choice for safety and durability reasons, and because they don't use cobalt which is sort of expensive and sort of rare. Not using cobalt means avoiding a resource that would bottleneck other manufacturers of EVs.

It'd be interesting to know what the actual specs are on the EV version of the USPS vans (battery type, capacity, etc...) and see if my speculation corresponds to what they chose. I don't know if they've released that publicly yet.

A 30kWh battery could easily be 5 or 10 thousand dollars, which may well be worth it to save on gas for a long time; on the other hand, gas engines are well-understood and really cheap, because we have a huge established industry that builds engines by the millions and has been optimizing for cost for over a hundred years.

This sounds a lot like the "Captain Samuel Vimes 'Boots' theory of socioeconomic unfairness" from Terry Pratchett that generally eventually gets quoted in this sorts of discussion.

https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/72745-the-reason-that-the-r...

I think it’s more about timing. Rfp in 2015, the ev landscape was different, and not super clear battery technology would be where it is now.

To some people it was. I have wondered then and I wonder now how it wasn't clear.

Between all the people looking at a problem you'll probably get every possible solution and one (or more) of them could be correct. Hindsight reinforces that opinion and makes it look more certain than it was at the time. But would you have bet the farm for your assumption then? It's easy to "see the future" when you have no risks to consider.

Also, I think that view only looks at the vehicle itself and neglects the onerous funding model the USPS is saddled with and the investment required on the supply chain/logistics side.

The fleet itself is a massive capital investment. But changing the fuel would be sizable as well. The USPS already has a supply chain network and facilities for gasoline. Replacing that will be huge in itself.

Municipalities are a better first-step and have had some success with moving bus fleets and maintenance vehicles to NG or EV. But they usually just have a handful of fueling stations and suppliers.

Fleet renewal is a pretty well understood budgeting process in any large scale logistics network (airlines, military, delivery..). You reach a point where replacing the fleet is a better investment than maintaining the current one.

To migrate to EVs, the USPS would likely wait out success in the private sector (like FedEx’s announcement) to demonstrate ROI, and retrofit this design or phase in a 2nd or 3rd iteration on it as a separate budget/RFP process.

The LLV's are not merely old, they're ancient. The EV marketplace still isn't particularly mature: there are competing charging networks, the charging standards are still evolving, and in the US, there are perhaps two mainstream manufacturers of pure BEVs (Tesla and Nissan).

If you're the sort of customer who keeps a vehicle 3 years and then upgrades, none of this is likely a worry for you. Any shakeup in the charging networks or incompatible changes to the standards will probably happen long after you sell the car.

The USPS, on the other hand is in this for the long haul. It seems reasonable to suppose that they'll have their own charging network, so problem solved, right? Wrong. They'll still need parts support every part of this operation for at least 35 years if they keep them as long as the LLVs.

Remember the lengths one dedicated person had to go to to resurrect the DE-19 connector[0]. You're looking at that problem multiplied by thousands of parts.

I've always coveted the original Honda Insight (the two seater), and one popped up for sale near me last year so I did some research. First party support is pretty well done. Third party support exists, but it's not a volume business, and it's priced accordingly. And that's a car that's only 15 years old.

The mail truck fleet will be bigger, but the price of parts will still be high if there are big shifts in the market and nobody's making anything similar. The market has matured and stabilized since Honda quit making the original Insight, but probably not enough to inexpensively support a vehicle for 3 decades.

[0] https://www.bigmessowires.com/2016/06/04/db-19-resurrecting-...

Except this is a PERFECT application of battery electric drivetrain. I literally can’t think of a better one. If this isn’t “good enough,” then precisely what is? What WON’T be sunk by short-sighted risk averseness (actually nothing risky here) or plain indifference if this can’t be electric?

And now they’ll have forced themselves into expensive conversions if they ever want to go electric in the next 3 decades.

It’s legitimately depressing.

You're not wrong, but as somebody who buys cars used and hangs on to them for a while, I'm sitting out going electric for at least another 5 years in the hope that things shake out somewhat on the charging side.

That, and for all of the reasons the USPS is sitting this out. The TCO has some pretty big unknowns over a multi-decade timescale at this point. I do a lot of my own work on my cars, and long-term parts availability is a real struggle at times.

I think J1772 has basically won in the U.S. for AC charging. It's hard to imagine something replacing it at this point. The competitors are Tesla's charge port and the other DC charging standards. DC chargers though require a lot of power and are expensive, so it's not realistic to expect them to be ubiquitous. J1772 is not much more than a 110 or 220 outlet with a fancy plug and electronic handshake protocol, and can be installed just about anywhere that a regular 110 or 220 outlet is, assuming adequate power is available at the site.

(A typical house might have dozens of outlets, but no one expects to be able to run a space heater off of every single plug all at once. Someone installing dozens of chargers, on the other hand, probably intends to use them simultaneously.)

That's essentially what the German Post did. They developed their own all electric van the streetscooter. Unfortunately they could not turn it into a viable business and sell enough units to others, so they shuttered the operation last year. Quite unfortunate, because I believe the project was well ahead of its time.

iirc German Post didn't really develop the Streetscoter [1] themselves, instead they acquired the company that did. It was a start up lead by a professor from university Aachen and from what I can remember, they had quite a lot of problems besides the ones you mentioned. There were a lot of recalls and other problems, especially towards the end of the company [2]

The post employees also often complained about the relatively high loading edge for the storage box, which makes it super hard to load and unload heavy packages.

Regardless of the problems, I think it was a really good idea and a rather cool looking vehicle. And when it comes to urban streets in Germany, the street scooter probably was the perfect vehicle when it comes to space requirements.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/StreetScooter [2] (German) https://www.businessinsider.de/gruenderszene/allgemein/stree... [3] (German) https://www.elektroauto-news.net/elektroautos/streetscooter-...

and they developed it it "by themselves" i.e. by a company they acquired for that purpose, because neither the volkswagen group, nor mercedes/daimler were able or willing to just shipmelectric local delivery mini vans.

last year deutsche post lost two streetscooter CEOs for "diverging opinions on the future of streetscooter". deutsche post is now trying to sell their subsidiary.

Th Norwegian Post Office uses electric vehicles. I saw one in the street in Drammen this morning. See https://elbil.no/posten-elbil/

Local postal company started using Swiss electric tricycles, though slightly customized. I imagine they aren't cheap to buy, but maybe total cost of ownership is reasonable? Also I assume they can tolerate winters well compared to two wheeled vehicles, yet can navigate narrow spaces.

https://www.post.ch/en/about-us/responsibility/our-prioritie...

ITT people arguing that a country with $7 trillion of spending budget can't install a few power outlets in its post offices.

I don't think that spending really goes to the post office tho.

The US is massive and its grid of infrastructure can't always keep up. But you're right that cities should have electrical USPS vehicles. Dominoes here have electrical bikes in city locations, why can't the post office have electrical cars?

It seems to me that a parcel-laden EV that starts and stops repeatedly will still be pretty lossy -- ie, the effective fuel efficiency will be quite low compared to typical EV city driving because regen doesn't work quite so well for precise stops. You're still going to engage the brake pads for a full stop in front of every mailbox.

Also, maintenance would probably be more expensive if you have to train people to work on the electric powertrain.

But presumably they could always modify the powertrain in a future iteration.

And somebody think about the extra load on the power grid!

It's not that these aren't valid concerns, they have to be addressed, they're just so minute they don't change the calculation even slightly.

EVs at that speed may lose a bit more (already more efficiently generated and used) power in regen - vs. a guaranteed 100% loss on a gas vehicle.

We already know there's a guaranteed loss on ICE braking. If that were the only difference between ICE and EV then I would totally agree with you...BUT

Cost/benefit analysis comparing ICE and EV changes wildly if the effective range of the vehicle is lower and the comparable fuel efficiency is not enough to justify the additional costs of EV.

These are fleet vehicles that get deployed all across the country, and they have to be serviced, moved, etc...I doubt the choice not to go EV was an oversight, considering that fleet has been one of the beachhead markets for alternative-energy vehicles.

Aaron Gordon at Vice gives some explanations - most important cost-related bit seems to be they weight upfront cost a lot more than amortized cost, and non-electric does better on that front.

https://www.vice.com/en/article/3an4k8/dont-expect-the-usps-...

Everyone hates OpEx, even Feddy'Gov.

Weight-per-wheel also figures into wear inflicted on local roads.

People on HN are technical, so we're discussing technical reasons. However, that's not really how the government works.

USPS leadership had instructions to electrify the fleet. For whatever reason, they decided they didn't want to. Maybe they didn't want to deal with a risky change, maybe they thought it would hinder meeting their other obligations. Doesn't matter. They decided they didn't want to do it.

Their next step is then to write requirements in their rfp such that they can select a contractor that cannot meet the electric mandate. This allows them to legally pass the buck for the electric thing to their contractor, who will get paid big dollars to "develop" electric vehicles that their customer doesn't want.

Congress gets to brag about their environmental contributions, USPS gets the vehicles they want, and the contractor gets a sizable sum to do nothing. Win-win-win.

I suspect they where afraid of push back from the previous administration as well.

I am surprised they didn't look at using LNG instead of petrol.

It’s too bad, a massive fleet built to spec, with central fueling and maintenance locations is a perfect use case for electric now even though we are potentially a long way from charging stations as convenient as gas stations.

They would also need to provide infrastructure for charging the fleet, possibly multiple times a day depending on what the routes look like, which is a significant cost if they want to do more than one battery worth of a route in a day, even if they did have short enough routes that they could do overnight charging for everything that's still a lot of power draw and would need expensive electrical upgrades. Sticking with gas there's no further infrastructure investment required.

Why are looks so important anyways?

Clearly USPS is trying to look after its employees, trying to ensure they have the best vehicle, suited for their work with minimal hassle.

Better for all of us. The new vehicle clearly has really good visibility with the giant windshield, meaning we’re much less likely to get run over by Newman

I always feel sad that Wayne Knight did not get more screen time.

Jerry did not use his talents to the fullest extent.

I really wish there was a spin-off with only Newman & Kramer.

Kramen.

That's a stupendously low step-in height. Probably makes a huge impact in reducing RSI and other repeated-motion injuries.

More weirdness please. Looks great to me.

Ya, this new design isn't nearly 'weird" enough.

Why have a nose at all?

Put driver's seat over the front wheels. Like the VW Vanagon (Eurovans). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volkswagen_Type_2_(T3)

These are gonna be EVs, right? Might as well do it right.

Having a nose that crumples is helpful in case of accidents. Turns out that VW Vanagons are deathtraps: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VmixmEkfLu0

Did you watch the video? The Volkswagen faired as ‘safe as a car’. It was the other manufacturers that failed miserably.

My conclusion from watching is that it seems like safety is a design problem that not every mfg designed for.

ICE firewalls are designed to deflect the enginedown and under in a head on collision. Vans with engine sitting between the driver and passenger in a doghouse, or worse engine in back makes their knees first on the scene of impact with little protection. The more bodywork and chassis/monocoque between you and the crumple zone the better.

Did you watch the video? It says the exactly opposite thing.

No impact to knees. No impact from steering wheel. Comparable to normal cars with hoods.

Cars in 1984 were death traps, too.

Yes that was said at the time about why flat front vehicles were safe in the sixties. rule of thumb is the heavier/bigger the vehicle the more front end protection you have. These look pretty flimsy like the Grummans.

Hopefully they have designed bracing into the frame to protect occupants.It's the high speed impacts by other vehicles that are the worry. Multi stop delivery is a major risk on busy roads. At least the design has the driver's feet just behind the front axle, would be interested to see the impact crumple one design.

http://www.postal-reporter.com/blog/postal-worker-injured-af...

Separately it is going to be very hot in that cab with all that glass

Not sure why you are voted down, this is exactly the content of the video.

Wish I could vote you up more than +1 to restore your karma.

Cars were many times less safe in 1984.

The Wikipedia article gives examples of safety tests where the T3 tested as relatively safe: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volkswagen_Type_2_(T3)#Safety_...

The T3 has a nose though...

No it doesn’t.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volkswagen_Transporter

I see a nose; looks like it sticks out about 6" past the bottom of the windshield? And the wikipedia article makes it sound like that is exactly the portion used as a "defomation area" to protect the legs of those in the front of the cab?

If that's a nose, then what isn't a nose? The next generation Eurovan and up had a very distinct "nose", which is what is being discussed in this conversation.

Glad I've watched the video.

It says the exactly opposite of your comment. The VW is safe, can be repaired and is comparable to normal cars with a hood.

This happens so often in comment sections, people drop a lengthy video, noone wants to watch a 15 minute video and they have a "proof" for their argument.

and is comparable to normal cars with a hood

Well, at least when compared to cars from 1984. I wonder how it would fare against a modern car?

Cars are much safer today, the paper below says that the probability of a driver being killed in a new 2008-2012 car is 0.29 versus 0.42 in a new 1985-1993 model year car.

https://crashstats.nhtsa.dot.gov/Api/Public/ViewPublication/...

(another interesting finding from that paper is that the probability of death increases as the vehicle ages, even within the same model year)

> (another interesting finding from that paper is that the probability of death increases as the vehicle ages, even within the same model year)

Looks like they don't speculate much on it -- they mention improvements in driver behavior over time and maintenance. Not bad, but my first thoughts were:

* a 20 year old vehicle is often driven by a person with a different socioeconomic situation than someone with a 1 year old vehicle, and those economic situations correlate heavily with other driving behaviors.

* as vehicles are getting safer and more powerful, highway speeds are rising, so 20 year old vehicle that are just keeping up with traffic are going faster than they used to.

One could also just use the current version of that car to compare to other cars. VW has been making that type of car forever and still does.

VW doesn't seem to make any van in the USA, I took a quick look and don't see any current rear-engined VW vans like the Vanagan sold in any country, but do see some front-engined styles sold in other countries.

Where do they still sell a rear engined Vanagan style van?

Wikipedia says the T3 was the last of the VW rear engined vans (last made in 2002 for the African market, and 1990 in Germany).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volkswagen_Type_2_(T3)

Steel has improved since then. Measures such as airbags have been introduced.

Why having a red hot engine land on your lap is considered a safety bonus I will never know.

Visibility is also better in the cabover design.

To be honest I don't see the point of the nose. In Europe, lorries and busses have flat front and have since I was born.

The nose is just somewhere for the front wheel to go. Otherwise the driver has to step over it to mount the vehicle. The VW looks like it's considerably higher off the ground which means more stepping up and stepping down, hundreds of times a day. You could put the wheel behind the cab, but that's terrible for manoeuvrability. It's better to have the wheels at the corners of the vehicle as much as possible.

Having a low nose is way more survival for people getting hit than a flat front.

HN is usually pretty utilitarian, I'm sure there are a lot of people on here that admire Mark Zuckerburgs "style" and seek to emulate it by not caring at all about how they dress and simply optimizing for clothes that will last the longest.

But there are also people out there who are influenced by wanting to look in a way they perceive as nice or cool and still have a satisfying life. I appreciate the tech culture that helped eliminate the suit but mostly because I like the way I dress and it's a form of expression for me. Plus it's nice regularly getting comments for putting in a little effort without having to resort to business casual. I know specifically my younger cousins admire that I can do a programming job and still wear (and are able to afford) clothes they'd want to wear.

Perhaps if the USPS trucks weren't the ugliest design that satisfied specs and instead seemed like some cutting edge vehicle there might be people out there who are growing up that would actually find it kind of fun or cool to drive around a USPS truck. It might be nice for it to be a job people want to do versus it being a secure job where you're the joke for driving around the ugliest vehicle on the road while dodging people's dogs.

As a simple example that well design can still be top quality, look at any of the trains on the Tokyo subway and train systems versus any train system in the US. They're far better functionally than any of the trains in New York or Chicago and look alot better inside and out as well. Maybe it looking impressive and not a tin can on wheels contributes to the increase in ridership for all groups of people, maybe that makes the job to be a conductor highly competitive to the point of it being a college degree worthy job. There are other things the train system does well but you still want to not hate riding on the vehicle.

An even simpler to understand example is the early days of android vs iPhone. Android was simply uglier but wasn't that different functionally. It was just extremely ugly to the point of people not wanting to buy it if they could afford to otherwise, so much so that Google invested a ton of money in creating Material Design

What looks ‘ugly’ today could very well look great in five years. The Transamerica Pyramid in San Francisco debuted to reception as an eyesore, but now it’s one of the main icons if the city. Weird is almost always good in my opinion. If it looks weird, that indicates it challenges assumptions and pushes the envelope forward.

A very similar building was put up in North Korea and only stopped being an eye sore after a facade was put over it.

Weird can be fashionable forward thinking but it's not always and I'd argue it's not usually unless there's a forward thinking artistic vision behind the weird that sees something new. Those electronic shirts that show wifi strength from a few years ago will never be fashionable but they definitely are weird. A government spec sheet is not a forward thinking artistic vision.

If they looked too good, the sad fact is that they might be targeted for being stolen.

Eh, I'm not sure about that. People don't steal cars because they look good. And the people who do, probably don't think box trucks are that attractive. Stolen vehicles are usually crimes of opportunity.

People would not steal nice looking federal government vehicles for similar reasons as they didn't steal wasteful spending on those Dodge Charger police cars. You're committing a crime where the government has the maximum amount of incentive to hunt you down and charge with the most number of crimes.

Stealing a regular person's car and crashing it isn't of much concern if you don't kill anyone.

And a charger is still a consumer automobile, where if you registered it under a different VIN (from a totaled charger probably) you would be able to drive it around without raising eyebrows.

What the hell are you going to do with a stolen mail truck? Everybody who sees it will know exactly where you got it

This article basically is - "The USPS trucks look that way because USPS design says they have to". It would have helped to explain why USPS has these specific requirements - safety, comfort and efficiency.

Are those the actual specific requirements? Would love to read more on the subject but it's hard to find authoritative sources.

Most government tenders for a contract are available online, I'm from Australia so not entirely sure what I'm looking at but this[1] appears to be some sort of reference to the tender, although there is limited information provided.

[1] https://beta.sam.gov/opp/588f5ed4becd4fc4abf6df8e7a918184/vi...

Edit: This[2] seems to be a notice of the contract being awarded to Oshkosh for exactly $481,877,752.00 USD.

[2] https://beta.sam.gov/opp/1e56c386808444d886124fc1927f4eb0/vi...

Why have a specific design anyways? In both Sweden and Spain, the cars carrying mail is typically just a normal half-truck (not sure about the correct name) with the post office branding. Here are two examples: https://c8.alamy.com/comp/DA5TW8/yellow-correos-spanish-post... - https://st2.depositphotos.com/3982569/5739/i/950/depositphot...

Seems to work fine. Packages gets carried in bigger trucks, but still just business trucks with different branding on them. Wouldn't it have saved a lot of cost in the end?

The name is a van or “panel van”

US mail trucks have the driver on the right hand side (as opposed to the left), so that they can deliver mail without having to get out of the driver's seat. Which naturally means we can't just reuse trucks made for the UK or other Commonwealth markets because... China or socialism or whatever.

TFA actually explains all this pretty well:

"The requirements dictated the step-in height, the glass height (including the low side glass), the vision angles, the internal height, and the maximum roof height," wrote Kahn in a tweet. "That was all locked in."

Other constraints included the ability to reach the mailbox while in the seated position, and the requirement to see the ground around the vehicle...

The true marvel about all of this is how somehow every other country in the world manages just fine without these requirements.

Every country's postal system is a system with a lot of interacting parts. You change one part, and it affects the others. Our postal system makes extensive use of mail delivered by vehicles directly to mailboxes that are located at the curb, on streets that are relatively dangerous for people. [0]

[0] I couldn't quickly find any believable stats, but I think it's a reasonable guess to start with traffic deaths in general, for which there are published numbers.

The first part (mail directly to mailboxes) is the same everywhere I've seen it too here in Europe (mostly Spain and Sweden to be fair). But yeah, the second one makes a lot of sense. Would actually explain a lot of the design choices for anything American. We don't have that much to worry about, so we can spend less on armored postal vans.

There's relatively few countries in the world that are as large and sparse as the US. Sprawling metropolis's are rare. In the rural areas, houses are miles apart.

And the requirements are dictated by what?

It certainly sounds reasonable to have an enclosed cargo area with sufficient head room for comfort, but saying they look like they do because there are requirements doesn't really explain it.

The millions of existing mailboxes installed at regulation height certainly play a big part of it.

My rural carrier had no problem putting mail in my mailbox from a modified jeep. They would stop and get out for packages of any size (putting them by the house).

In town here, it's all walking routes. I wonder what the numbers are on curbside vs walking?

Your rural mail carrier selected the vehicle based on a known defined mailbox height.

Yes, that was my point, they were able to buy an (apparently) suitable vehicle 'off the shelf'.

And those jeeps had generally terrible visibility. You're making a lot of statements with little to no data, nor even research on to why they would want to improve.

I disagree.

I made 1 statement saying that requirements aren't explanations, 1 statement that I observed a rural carrier use a jeep for years, and then a statement that jeeps are in fact commercially available.

I would certainly expect a jeep with a mirror bolted on the traffic side to have better rear and side visibility than something with no glass in the back, so go ahead and hang your hat on visibility if you want.

Modified jeeps are the best you can get without the leverage of being able to write 9 digit contracts. That doesn't make them ideal.

Aftermarket RHD modified vehicles have a lot of issues, like being able to see the gauges, the ability to operate all of the ancillary controls, interference with factory safety equipment, poor ergonomics, etc.

https://www.postalthings.com/images/MailTrays/KiaMailTray.jp...

I saw that, but those constraints don't seem to be necessary for postal vehicles in other countries. The person I was responding to was wondering why other countries seem to just fine with regular looking vans that have postal branding. It's worth asking about, isn't it?

Just because those things are spec'd as they are, that doesn't mean they need to be.

Most countries don't really have US-style mailboxes either.

And yet.....everyone manages. Houses in rural areas have mailboxes outside of the property, sure they are not the iconic american half-pipe shape, but properties all over the world have mailboxes too.

Right, everyone manages with what we have now so why change anything? I mean who cares if increased visibility reduces the number of pedestrian collisions, who cares if seat designs reduce the number of back injuries. The world is good enough as it is.

Each country has their own circumstances to deal with. This design would not make sense in Europe where a lot of the last mile delivery was done by mail carriers on foot or bicycles. However it does boost efficiency considerably in the USA's vast expanse of suburbia. FWIW, mail trucks in Canada also have with right hand drive and low floor so the driver could reach into mailboxes without having to leave their seat.

My local postal service used to make delivery on bicycles but they have gradually introduced golf-cart like miniature EVs. This allow each run to cover a much larger area but probably would not for the most of US because their mail routes are too long.

> However it does boost efficiency considerably in the USA's vast expanse of suburbia.

Also it sounds like the new trucks have pretty stringent visibility requirements, which would help avoid running over playing children in a suburban setting. I can see that as a pretty serious risk for the USPS, given how frequently they stop for a few minutes. An off-the-shelf van without the unusually shaped front probably has more blind spots a kid could sneak into.

At scale it makes sense to have control of part supplies and have consistent service processes. UPS and to a lesser extent FedEx also use custom bodies.

Quite a few national postal services use custom or semi-custom vehicles, e.g. Deutsche Post. For those that use more "off the shelf" vehicles they are probably still custom orders specifying an exact feature set. But at the end of the day, it just becomes a matter of cost/benefit. The USPS is enormous, and that large scale makes it financially viable for them to purchase a custom vehicle since the quantities are so great. This allows them to get exactly what they want which gains some operating efficiency.

Oshkosh is also a very well established manufacturer of vehicles for the government and holds substantial military contracts for custom vehicles such as the highly recognizable HEMTT. So the Oshkosh purchase is fairly low-risk in that Oshkosh has a proven track record of delivering vehicles for government fleets.

UPS and FedEx also make use of largely custom vehicles. They are based on off-the-shelf step vans, but to a large extent OTS step vans no longer exist in the US and nearly all of them you see are contract designs for fleets. There's a bit of a cyclical relationship here as the modern step van is basically defined by UPS and FedEx, which purchase their trucks custom to specification from body-makers like Utilimaster and formerly Grumman-Olson. Grumman popping up here again is not coincidental - the USPS and UPS formerly got their custom trucks from the same manufacturer, but Grumman-Olson is no longer nearly as important of a player as it once was.

The short answer: USPS is contracting for at least 50,000 vehicles. When you buy 50,000 of just about anything you gain a lot of leverage to customize.

The article (and your comment) explains how the design conforms to the constraints but what I think they were asking was why have those specific constraints in the first place (apart from "that's how it's always been done here.")

Now, I understand that it's to prevent accidents, make it more easy to put mail into mailboxes if they're situated right next to the road, etc. Yet somehow every other country makes it work without specialized vehicles.

I mean, we used to make cars work without seatbelts, so why did we ever add them?

"Opposite-driven" postal vehicles have been common/standard in Europe for a very long time. It's not a complex thing to change, especially since many car models are made to be sold in e.g. the UK anyways.

“ China or socialism or whatever.”? What do you mean?

It was a joke.

While USPS is not subject to "Buy America" requirements, like most quasi-governmental organizations it does have an acquisition policy of purchasing vehicles from US manufacturers rather than overseas when possible. This aligns with the general US system of preferential government purchasing, in which federal purchasing decisions are based partially on policy objectives such as promoting small businesses and US manufacturing. There could be some debate over this policy position, but at its core it could be viewed as a very light extension of New Deal principles---that the federal government should put its money where its mouth is by patronizing the types of US businesses that are the subject of so much political rhetoric.

To my knowledge, there are no right-hand-drive vehicles manufactured in the US, as RHD is limited to countries closer to extensive auto manufacturing in Europe and Asia. As a stopgap measure, the Postal Service has been making use of domestic minivans converted to RHD using a belt arrangement that does not look particularly user friendly. The driver has to lean over to see the dashboard instruments.

What surprises me us that the USPS is buying the vehicles directly from Oshkosh as a customer, rather than buying the technical design package and contracting construction out to several smaller companies.

Unit cost would be higher but it would be laying the groundwork for the next generation of vehicle, sustaining those smaller companies and encouraging innovation. As well as avoiding too much reliance on one supplier.

Same with Canada Post AIUI. How often does the right-hand driver's seat thing come into play? Seems like the procurement for this kind of custom vehicle couldn't/won't be cheap.

I'd wager ~75% of mailboxes are delivered to with a RHD vehicle. So it matters a lot.

TIL, thanks. Maybe it's different for rural areas, but here in (sub)urban Canada postal workers hit a few houses at a time (and you can tell because most of them wear comfortable walking shoes too). I just looked it up and it seems like their new electric vehicles aren't RHD either, would be curious to know how that decision transpired :)

I heard a few years ago that Canada Post was forcing everyone to use a communal mailbox at a semi-central location close to their house, even in fairly rural areas. If that's the case, it'd also make a lot more sense to just have a normal van, IMO.

I think that plan may have been axed, as (anecdotally) the number of communal mailboxes seems to be relatively low among the few cities I've visited/lived in over the past couple of years. Also anecdotally, I'm not sure why the majority of houses (in the burbs) seem to have a mailbox by the door or a mail slot instead of box by the curb. They definitely exist, but feel like a minority outside of rural areas.

On all but urban routes US mail carriers never get out of their vehicles, unless they have something too big to fit in the box.

In the NY suburb I grew up in, we had a mailbox attached to our house, not at the street. The house was set back from the road about 50 feet. The mail carrier would park their car, fill up a messenger bag, and walk around to a few houses and drop off the mail. Then they'd return to their car, move down the street a bit, and repeat. It was quite a bit of walking for the postal worker.

It does depend on locale. In US cities where there's some density the postal worker will usually leave their truck (which is often a regular, non-custom, mid-size box truck) at the end of a street, fill up a wheeled bag, and walk to several buildings with the bag to drop things off, before returning to the truck and moving to the next location.

But in most suburbs (which is a lot of the US), at least where there are mailboxes at the curb (and not mail slots on houses), the postal worker will just drive from mailbox to mailbox, dropping mail as they go, never leaving the vehicle, only getting out of their seat when they need to add more mail to the box sitting next to them.

RHD is pretty common. That's how all vehicles sold in the UK, Japan, and Australia (and some other places) are sold.

There there are conversion kits for common rural postal vehicles (jeeps)

You can buy right-drive jeep wranglers new in the US today, even. They aren't real common but can be ordered.

Not to mention India

For 165,000 vehicles that will be used for a long time, it probably doesn't matter a great deal.

I don't mean that it doesn't matter at all, the procurement process needs to make sense and not be a path for graft, but there's reasonable volume there to spread fixed costs across.

A friend of mine delivered for Canada Post.

A few years ago, exiting the vehicle on the left side to come around to the curb, he was struck by a car in a hit and run (they never caught the driver). Spent 6 months in hospital learning to walk again, and while he’s since somewhat recovered, he’s going to spend the rest of his life living in significant pain.

Not having to exit into the road, when the job involves people exiting the vehicles hundreds of thousands of times per year, matters a lot for the long-term safety of the delivery force.

The same reason Amazon runs its own shipping network instead of relying on UPS or Fedex. At a certain scale it is cheaper to get a custom option that specifically fits your needs rather than retro-fitting something else. The USPS bought 100,000 of the last truck and, for example, one of the requirements was long service life. Building a truck you can use for 30 years is probably much cheaper than buying multiple lower service life trucks over that period.

> The same reason Amazon runs its own shipping network instead of relying on UPS or Fedex.

Amazon use off-the-shelf vehicles though.

> one of the requirements was long service life

I wonder how they require that. Does the manufacturer have to warranty them all for 30 years? That's extraordinary!

That's rapidly changing.

https://www.aboutamazon.com/news/transportation/amazons-cust...

"Just one year after announcing the purchase of 100,000 custom electric delivery vehicles as part of The Climate Pledge, Amazon has begun testing the new vans on delivery routes."

AWS also used "off-the-shelf" CPUs for a long time. That's changing as well. The USPS definitely has the scale and need for customization.

Not really, CPU is still "of-the-shelf". SoC is custom. That's just because you can't buy Neoverse and drop it into the motherboard, so making a custom SoC is the only way to obtain it.

Donut has a good video about LLV: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RE5FGyq12ds

> I wonder how they require that. Does the manufacturer have to warranty them all for 30 years? That's extraordinary!

In 1986, they road-tested the contract competitors' trucks for 24,000 miles, and the Grumman LLV (the truck that this new vehicle replaces) was the only one running at the end. Definitely not proof that they'd run for the intended 24 year lifespan, but I guess the USPS got lucky with the LLV (they even stretched it 6 years past the original retirement date!).

https://www.nytimes.com/1986/04/09/business/postal-contract-...

Amazon, UPS, and FedEx all have custom vehicles. Amazon started with off the shelf vehicles, but once you get to ordering 50,000 of something, you may as well make the design fit your needs instead of only meeting them.

>Amazon use off-the-shelf vehicles though.

Not for long, they even invested in Rivian, an EV manufacturer, who is going to build vehicles to their spec.

I don't think Amazon does letter deliveries from the driver seat.

Wouldn't it be funny if they did? I can imagine perhaps USPS contracting out some low volume routes to Amazon.

I bet it's the opposite. Amazon delivers in densely populated places where economies of scale make it work and outsources rural delivery to the USPS, an agency with a universal delivery mandate. Yes, the net effect is Amazon "leeching" off the government, but you could also view it as a subsidy to rural Americans, and the government already has a lot of those.

Mail trucks have pretty drastically different requirements than a parcel delivery truck. Mail trucks are designed for a right sided driver and lots of stops on every block, so good visibility to avoid crashing into oncoming traffic or hitting pedestrians in the front is obligatory. Amazon, UPS, and friends have much more infrequent stops. USPS also needs vehicles that can last for decades with much lower maintenance costs than commercial competitors. With the Biden Admin's government fleet electrification plan, they'll also need to be easily built or converted to battery-powered.

And this is a significant difference to how mail is delivered in most of Europe, where the vast majority of last-mile delivery is done on foot or on bike, and relatively little is done by vehicle. Density undoubtedly plays a fair role here.

I especially like that one,

https://newsroom.hermesworld.com/city-logistik-hermes-testet...

Was wowed the first time I encountered one.

Not just density. Many neighborhoods aren't (safely) accessible without a car in the US.

They may only be connected to a highway, with no bus service to it.

> requirements ... obligatory ... needs ...

Yet other countries' mail services manage without all these things just fine?

The US is unique in it's low population density and enormous scale of it's postal service.

Yep. There are very few countries that have a huge land area with extremely remote population and a postal service with a universal service mandate for all its citizens (going so far as to run daily mule trains down the Grand Canyon to service to the Havasupi nation[1])

[1] https://historydaily.org/havasupai-post-office-grand-canyon

OK, both Amazon and Facebook (and likely Google, can't remember) order custom servers for their datacenters, instead of going with readily available Supermicro, Dell, HP, IBM offerings.

Same reasoning here: at such a scale, having a custom-built thing optimized for a bunch of your specific requirements, and made uniform, pays off.

It’s a good question. I went looking for an answer. I found this article [1] which claims the long service life owes to an engine and chassis that, while not exceptionally durable, is cheap and easy to maintain.

The article also says you can learn more at llv.com.

Bonus, I learned that Grumman LLV stands for Grumman Long Life Vehicle. Maybe everyone else already knew that, but I thought it was cool.

1 - https://www.speedsportlife.com/2010/02/22/avoidable-contact-...

The United States is a vast, sprawling area with nearly every conceivable type of geography. The road conditions and residential density covers all possible ranges. The truck is designed for the worst case scenario allowable while minimizing drivers danger.

Also, the USPS uses panel vans in denser areas. My neighborhood in Seattle has the mail delivered in a Sprinter/ProMaster/Transit thing, but weird trucks are ubiquitous elsewhere.

The USPS also uses Jeeps in the sticks, but those aren't common enough to be seen by most people.

> The USPS also uses Jeeps in the sticks, but those aren't common enough to be seen by most people.

Their previous standard mail trucks were a Jeep variant, too: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeep_DJ

In the sticks they frequently outsource to authorized personally owned vehicles. Those are common all throughout Appalachia for example. They call them rural carrier associates. Here is the pitch:

"As a Postal Service™ Rural Carrier Associate (RCA), you will have a continuous, part-time job with a reliable employer. If you are retired, self-employed, an at-home parent, an educator, night student, or are employed on an evening shift schedule, this on-call position could be the ideal job for you.RCAs are responsible for the safe and efficient delivery and collection of the U.S. Mail™, working part time when regular carriers have scheduled days off or take vacation days. RCAs also sell stamps, supplies, and money orders. RCAs perform a vital function in the Postal Service, serving thousands of families and businesses in rural and suburban areas while traveling millions of miles daily. The work can be demanding—but also rewarding."

And a note about the vehicles:

"Generally, RCAs are required to use their own vehicles for mail delivery, and they receive an equipment allowance in addition to regular pay. The vehicle needs to be insured, dependable, and in good working condition. Vehicles with bucket seats or standard transmission are not recommended. Some offices may provide a Postal Service vehicle."

My last house was serviced by RCAs. One had a Subaru Outback with a system of gears and pullies that let it be driven from the right side without removing the factory left side drive. Another had an actual right hand drive vehicle, probably imported. There's likely a small but strong demand for right hand drive vehicles that happen to end up in the US with RCAs buying most of them.

A few simply had two people in the vehicle, one driving and the other placing mail in the mailboxes.

Please tell me you have photos of that driving setup.

Probably something like these examples:

https://www.thedrive.com/news/37520/these-trick-pulley-syste...

https://www.postalthings.com/right-hand-drive-kits

> The United States is a vast, sprawling area with nearly every conceivable type of geography. The road conditions and residential density covers all possible ranges. The truck is designed for the worst case scenario allowable while minimizing drivers danger.

I'm pretty sure most of the geography in the US can be found in either Spain or Sweden as well. Except jungle I guess, but don't think you have much of that over there either. Besides the point anyway.

Yeah, the cars here do drive through a lot of different geographies as well. In the denser areas like cities, the postal workers are most often on motobikes or just walking though, depending on the density of the city.

The premise, that the postal service in the US only uses the special vehicles, seems to be incorrect.

One requirement seems to be that the driver can access the mailbox without leaving the vehicle. So the equivalent in Europe would be the bikes (or, nowadays, electric scooters) that are used to deliver mail. They are typically specifically designed for the postal service.

So it might be less different than it seems at first.

Same thing with the Swedish cars. That's why they're right hand drive unlike other cars.

https://cdn.arbetet.se/app/uploads/2016/04/09235113/01-Brevb...

I'm wondering- Sweden drove on the left until relatively recently (they switched in 1967), even though most cars were left-hand drive. Did this mean that the Swedish postal service was more likely to be set up for mail to be delivered without the carrier having to get out of their car- as they would probably be driving an LHD car on the left anyway?

Where I grew up, the rural mail carriers drove their own vehicles. Ours drove his (Subaru wagon I think) from the middle of the bench seat - gas and brake with the left foot.

Some others in the area imported RHD vehicles.

I believe that this is the only correct response to this question.

In the UK, we have letterboxes in our front doors. Nobody can drive up to them (mine is up two flights of steps!). So, last-yard post delivery is done on foot, and vehicles are used to deliver the postmen (and in urban areas, postmen will travel from the delivery office by foot or bicycle). The vehicles can thus be normal vans.

In the US, they have mailboxes on posts by the kerb. Postmen can drive right up to them to deliver the post. There, it makes sense to have specialist vehicles.

I suspect Sweden and Spain are like the UK, and not the US, in this respect.

> I suspect Sweden and Spain are like the UK, and not the US, in this respect.

Not really. The country side in Sweden at least have mailboxes on the kerb for everyone, it's really common. And the mail workers still seem to manage dumping the mail into there without leaving the car, without having a specialty designed car for it.

in uk all the services drive boring old Transits or whatever. At least Royal Mail have some respect for their Postman Pat legacy and paint their vans red. But there is one outstanding exception: UPS. I don't even see so many of them around, so i'm not pure why it's economical for them and why only they use custom vans, but i respect them for that.

Possibly because as a global company, it's easier for them to have shared vehicles and parts across their entire service area (most the world). They can probably just fly the vans/trucks and parts in wherever they are needed, since they run their own fleet of (very large) planes as well.

At least the majority I see around here are relatively standard European chassis-cabs (recently Mercedes-Benz Sprinter) with a custom body. While yes, that's more custom than just having a custom fitting inside a van, it's much less extreme than a custom vehicle.

To my untrained eye, they look bespoke, i will just take your word for it that only the body is custom. thanks.

Well, UPS vehicles look regular here: https://fastly.4sqi.net/img/general/600x600/5543516_Ag-wE02m...

But I guess these don't really count as these are suncontractor vehicles...

those are the wrong ones.

Rural USPS mail carriers will sometimes use right hand drive SUVs and minivans. There is also a bigger "ice cream truck" for packages.

Scale, USPS deliver far more mail than others. USPS had pretty specific requirements and not a single existing truck existed or could pass an endurance test.

Good video on subject: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RE5FGyq12ds

While using a regular truck is likely much more cost effective than having a specific one (less investment, easier repairs, ...), each design may be optimal for some situations: some trucks have the size to load pallets, some are equipped to load big/heavy stuff, ...

Most regular vehicles are not optimised for many/small/various packages and are not optimised for high frequency in/out and searching/unloading as mail trucks would need. You'll easily see how the package/postal delivery drivers loose time searching the packages through the back and energy bending, opening/closing doors when they use such regular trucks.

One of the great things here is how they seem to look for best posture and efficiency for the driver: it's not only about speed of delivery, but likely to also prevent accidents during the trip, injuries from the work, ...

Time and motion to maximise the efficiency of the postie its why the old trucks sit the driver on the near side.

Another point is now once your train the entire work force in a specific vehicle, you can trust most everyone employed knows how to use the one vehicle you use. Easy to rotate and repair vehicles when they're all the same.

I think I remember seeing the vehicle delivering mail at my old apartment building and it wasn't a grumman whatsit but a regular van or delivery truck. So I don't think the special vehicles are universal in the US either. I also think I've seen postal jeeps although that may have been a long time ago.

I had never seen a USPS vehicle until I was a legal adult and moved to college. I grew up in a very rural part of New England, America - on a dirt road. Winter had plenty of snow and plowing wasn't a guarantee at all. Considering the USPS Creed "Neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night stays these couriers from the swift completion of their appointed rounds" -- Snow is the first one! Our "mail lady"** drove a Jeep Wrangler with the steering on the right instead of the left, and the passenger seat removed to make room for mail.

**She was known as "the mail lady" because our town only had 1 mail carrier. I realize that term wouldn't fly today, but this was rural America 30 years ago and I wanted to give context. Same mail carrier for 20+ years. Worked 6 days a week. Her name was Linda - Bless her for her hard work.

Okay I'm genuinely curious why "mail lady" wouldn't fly today.

...why not?

Gendered terms are becoming less popular to describe people in situations where their gender doesn't matter. So we might say "mail person" or "mail carrier", the same as we say "firefighter" instead of "fireman".

It's not "cancel culture" as the sibling comment suggests; it's rarely people being outraged about imagined attacks. It's just language evolving as society evolves. As an added bonus, sticking with non-gendered terms means you don't accidentally insult someone by assuming something based on their body type or haircut, and it leaves space for non-binary or non-conforming people to not be accidentally made to feel unwelcome.

I'd like to unsubscribe from this alternative reality of the world please.

Why do you have a problem with this "alternative" reality?

It's annoying to have to constantly wonder if I'm saying something offensive when I absolutely do not intend that.

In this case, I wouldn't have thought anything was wrong with "mail lady" and might have said the same thing if my mail carrier were a woman (which she is). Now I read this thread and realize that some people would think it is a problem.

This cultural wave of making seemingly harmless language into problems is one more barrier to speaking anything at all unless I'm talking to people I know well.

It's not that the term "mail lady" offends anyone. It doesn't.

The point is that singling out her gender is needless, and kinda seems a bit strange if gender was never really pertinent to the story in the first place.

"Cancel culture" would be going through high school recommended reading lists and removing books that focused "wrongly" on gender or something.

> It's not that the term "mail lady" offends anyone. It doesn't.

I think that's too generous. I've definitely met people who just enjoy feeling indignation at anything.

Funny; since you are right now bringing up this group of people to express indignation towards their behavior.

There's a difference between laughing at and being outraged by. Pointing and laughing is perfectly reasonable, getting bent out of shape over imagined slights is paranoia.

Despite you using the word 'funny' I don't think you were laughing while posting that whereas the GP was.

Lets be realistic, that's most people. Everyone thinks their pet causes to get offended about are justified. Even people getting indignant about cancel culture are enjoying their indignation.

It would be weird if you were just saying "the female-mail carrier" for no reason. But we usually describe people to differentiate them from someone else for conversation.

Like "the mail lady says she likes our cat", differentiating from the mail guy who we also don't know personally, but who doesn't like the animals.

Also, it's sex not gender people are referring to.

> "Cancel culture" would be going through high school recommended reading lists and removing books that focused "wrongly" on gender or something.

That certainly is, but it doesn't end with their most egregious actions.

> Also, it's sex not gender people are referring to.

I don't think so. "The mail carrier follows female gender roles" is bad enough, but why would you describe someone as "the mail carrier with a vagina"?

>> Also, it's sex not gender people are referring to.

> I don't think so.

You don't think lady in 'mail-lady' refers to woman?

> why would you describe someone as "the mail carrier with a vagina"?

Rude. I never would. But if I did it would be redundant after calling her a woman. What do you mean?

But maybe I'm trying to help my brother find a partner so I do want to point out available women, and that does imply people with vaginas. Again, so, and what do you think would be a more efficient way to do this?

> You don't think lady in 'mail-lady' refers to woman?

It can either refer to their sex or their gender.

> Rude. I never would. But if I did it would be redundant after calling her a woman. What do you mean?

If we refer to sex, a woman/lady is someone with a vagina. So yes, if you call someone a mail lady, you literally are describing her as a mail carrier with a vagina.

> But maybe I'm trying to help my brother find a partner so I do want to point out available women, and that does imply people with vaginas. Again, so, and what do you think would be a more efficient way to do this?

In that case, you might also talk about "the cute ginger mail lady with blue eyes" (or whatever your brother likes). But in most situations, that would be quite inappropriate.

> It can either refer to their sex or their gender

That seems unlikely and definitely unproven.

We're told gender expression is individual, so the gendered concepts you hold for 'woman' aren't going to be the ones I hold. Thus is seems unlikely that we're referring to gender or nobody would be able to understand each other.

Also, we refer to people by the same pronouns whether they're awake or sleeping, cross dressing or not, which changes their gender expression, but not their sex.

> If we refer to sex, a woman/lady is someone with a vagina.

Which we do. Yes.

> So yes, if you call someone a mail lady, you literally are describing her as a mail carrier with a vagina.

No. I'm also not describing her as a bipedal humanoid. Some things are just expected unless you say otherwise.

> the cute ginger mail lady with blue eyes

Yes, lady. Okay, so no suggestion.

> But in most situations, that would be quite inappropriate.

Right, right, human attraction is verboten.

> might have said the same thing if my mail carrier were a woman (which she is).

Probably. Most people who look like women are. But some are actually closeted non-binary people or trans men. In which case calling them a lady isn't offensive, but it hurts.

It's easy to offend without intending to, so I don't get how your intentions are relevant. Yes it can be annoying and difficult to consider the impact of your words and how they might be perceived by other, different, people. It would be simpler if you didn't have to think about that at all. But is that really the argument? It's a big hassle and you'd rather not have to do it?

It is too big of a hassle. We should not have to overanalyze everything we say. It is not even possible. We don't speak in code, we speak in highly interprative languages. Many meanings and interpretations of a statement can be made. People from different ages, regions, religions, etc. will interpret things different ways. It is literally impossible to view everything you say through all possible interpretations. There is no way that any single person can know every possible interpretation of what they say.

> It is literally impossible to view everything you say through all possible interpretations. There is no way that any single person can know every possible interpretation of what they say.

100% agreed. Don't see how it relates to what I wrote however.

For me, it's a minor hassle and I move on. I think for many people, it's an easy thing to rebel against, and generates conflict where there is no need for it.

Instead of people correcting mistaken assumptions about themselves and moving on (which happens to everyone in many ways, not just trans peoples' gender), we have this stupid culture war about the topic.

> But is that really the argument? It's a big hassle and you'd rather not have to do it?

No, that the people "being offended" are just lying to get their way. You know it's true.

> so I don't get how your intentions are relevant.

Right, because the baying mob never has time for relevance or subtlety.

Because it's newspeak that treats innocuous language like evidence of thoughtcrime.

The US should take up the nice UK gender-neutral term of Postie.

Probably just because of the gendered noun? "Mailman" and "mail lady" having been replaced in general use by the non-gendered "mail carrier" or "postal worker."

I just call them all Clavins.

Same for me — rural town 30 years ago. A classmate's mom was the mail carrier for the whole town and used a station wagon similarly fitted (RHD, sign on the back).

I grew up in a rural area too and the mail carrier drove their own vehicles. In fact, when I was a kid my parents bought a stick shift from someone and the person said they were selling it because they got a job as a mail carrier and needed an automatic.

For what it's worth, that's never been USPS's motto or policy. https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/87770/neither-snow-nor-r...

I have official USPS "merch" adorned with that motto and the USPS mail trucks in a rural Colorado town I often visit have a portion of it written on the sides. It may not be their official policy or motto (likely for legal reasons) but it is officially associated with the service in some capacity.

This is still how it is in rural areas. We have a mail lady. I've seen multiple vehicles -- some of them Jeeps. We don't get the LLVs out our way.

On the USPS Creed, I was a paperboy when I was a teen and always chuckled at that. I never got Sundays off. I don't think I ever had a snow day, but there were days the US mail didn't run due to weather.

"Oddly-shaped mail trucks seem to be a staple of Americana."

As a non-American I have always found this amusing.

Here in New Zealand Post was until a few years ago delivered by bicycle in cities (SUVs or vans in rural areas). They have since moved towards small electric vehicles called Paxster. Basically large four wheel scooters that can ride on both the road and pavement.

https://jobs.nzpost.co.nz/paxster

Based on those vehicles I am guessing NZPost doesn't handle the amount of junk mail and Amazon packages that USPS has to shuffle around.

They deliver mail and small packets only. Parcels are delivered in vans.

But no, the NZPost business model (or lack thereof) does not depend on junk mail. Mail is ridiculously expensive, ~50%+ more expensive than the USA, so addressed junk mail is relatively rare, maybe one item per month.

Packages in NZ are mostly delivered by small owner-operated vans like: https://www.google.com/search?q=courier+van+site:nz&tbm=isch

In cities in the US, it's similar. They have full size vans that aren't particularly custom for routes where the delivery person gets out and walks to the mailboxes. These new vehicles, and the ones they replace, are largely for suburban/rural deliveries where they drive right up to the mailbox, and so need a right hand drive vehicle.

Here in Germany DHL and the like use ebikes for the letter / small packet post daily, and the bigger stuff just gets dropped off by a van... seems to work...

In Australia the Honda CT90->CT110->NBC110 "Postie Bike" was, up until 2015 or so, the best selling motorcycle for decades, so much so that it almost always got left out of motorcycle market share reporting.

Australia Post used to buy ~2000 of them a year, but recently have replaced most of the motorcycles with bicycles and electric bicycles (and the volume of ordinary letters that are suitable for motorcycle/bicycle/walking delivery has also plummeted, these days an enormous (literal) volume of mail is parcels from China/Amazon, which don't fit as neatly/efficiently in a motorcycle pannier an are mostly delivered by contractors in generic white vans.

"In terms of actual numbers, a major contributor to the fall has been the Australia Post ‘postie bike’ fleet. After artificially inflating new bike sales figures for years, sales of the postie bike (formerly CT110, now NBC110) fell 43 per cent in 2017 and a further 52 per cent last year. Australia’s top-selling ‘road bike’ for years, the NBC110 only scraped into the road category’s Top Ten last year and didn’t even figure in the overall Top Ten." -- https://www.justbikes.com.au/news-and-reviews/2018-australia...

and:

"For years, the CT110 was Australia’s top-selling motorcycle, but almost the entirety of those sales went to Australia Post. With the decline in letter delivery and Australia Post’s move to electric trikes better suited to parcel delivery, CT 110 / NBC 110 sales have fallen rapidly in recent years, including a 52 per cent drop in 2018 alone. The NBC 110 didn’t even appear in the ‘Top 10’ listings provided by the FCAI, suggesting less than 500 units were sold last year. That compares to 1,447 sales just two years ago." -- https://www.justbikes.com.au/news-and-reviews/motorcycle-sal...

Japan Post is still using Honda SuperCub. Maybe Honda will release an electric version they can upgrade to.

I'm also in New Zealand. What I found really interesting about this article was that apparently US mailboxes are positioned right by the road so that the mail carrier can directly drop the mail in from a vehicle. Clever! Although it must make it more likely to get your mailbox knocked over by a car.

Here the mailbox is usually on the other side of a grass verge and footpath (sidewalk), too far to reach from the road.

See also school buses. In the UK we just use normal coaches.

Looks aside, air conditioning is a win for postal workers in hot climates. The Grumman LLV doesn't have it, and postal workers are required to keep the windows shut when they leave the vehicle, even in 115°F days in Phoenix.

I imagine they will keep a few gas powered vehicles for very hot climates.

What? AC is unrelated to the energy source of the drivetrain.

At the end of the day, you need enough energy onboard, and gas is much more dense.

Hybrid cars turn the ICE engine on at intersection when AC or heat is on, to convert gas into electricity and avoid depleting the batteries completely.

Thanks for explaining energy density to me! Now explain why AC matters when the new contract is for ICE vehicles. You and the original commenter I was responding to seem to be worried about nothing.

I think OP meant that needing AC in a lot of vehicles in the US (everywhere it gets really hot) a 100% electrical fleet didn't make sense, and that this consideration might have influenced the decision to go with ICE.

If you are not being sarcastic about learning about density, check out why, it was mind boggling for me!

I think you're thinking of Alternating Current and they're thinking of Air Conditioning.

No, I'm pretty confident I'm talking about Air Conditioning, considering that's what I was responding to.

But is it serious compared to cold situation? Cooling 40C to 25C is just -15C difference, but warming -10C to 20C is 30C.

Valid question, I don't know the exact answer, but keep in mind that a closed cabin with windows will heat up naturally when the sun is up. Humans generate heat which is also trapped in that cabin. Inefficiencies in transmission etc... also generate heat although I'm not sure it's enough to make a difference.

Remember that the international space station is artificially cooled despite one side being exposed to 0 Kelvin.

I've lived in Phoenix for over a decade, where it regularly reaches 120F during the summer.

Not once have I ever seen a USPS vehicle other than the Grumman LLV, which has no AC, even during the summer months and at several different residences across the state.

Presumably the government gets a price discount for ordering in massive bulk. Any idea what the price per unit is for either the gas or electric version?

The press release kind of vaguely implies a price range:

https://about.usps.com/newsroom/national-releases/2021/0223-...

> Under the contract’s initial $482 million investment, Oshkosh Defense will finalize the production design of the Next Generation Delivery Vehicle (NGDV) — a purpose-built, right-hand-drive vehicle for mail and package delivery — and will assemble 50,000 to 165,000 of them over 10 years. The vehicles will be equipped with either fuel-efficient internal combustion engines or battery electric powertrains and can be retrofitted to keep pace with advances in electric vehicle technologies. The initial investment includes plant tooling and build-out for the U.S. manufacturing facility where final vehicle assembly will occur.

> The contract is the first part of a multi-billion-dollar 10-year effort to replace the Postal Service’s delivery vehicle fleet, one of the world’s largest.

If "multi-billion-dollar" means about two billion and they make 50,000 vans, that's $40,000 per van. If they make 165,000 for 2 billion, that's about $12,100 per van. I guess that range sounds sort of reasonable.

If you are curious about the fuel like me -- 10% of the new vehicles will be electric [1].

[1] https://www.theverge.com/2021/2/25/22300281/usps-new-mail-tr...

Awesome that it is designed to be electric conversion-friendly. I'd call this a win for functional design constraints because it looks very practical, in a good way. Needs: safety and efficiency.

Too bad it’s not higher. But that’s a good start. It’s a clear win for a well-engineered electric drivetrain given the low miles typically traveled per day (BUT high total miles on odometers as they’re made to last decades), typically low speeds, and extensive stop and start. Playing almost entirely to electric’s strengths and the weaknesses of internal combustion. In an ideal world, I’d hope it’d be 50% electric and 50% plug-in hybrid.

I can't imagine more than a handful of post offices are ready to plug in all of their trucks right now. They're almost all going to need power upgrades.

Well, that should be part of the plan too. We're making ourselves poorer half-assing everything.

Things take time in the real world. Unfortunately there are whole supply chains to deal with. 10% is a solid start and shows intention beyond just a proof of concept.

That sounds like an excuse. They’re already using vehicles today. There’s no good reason that 90% of these can’t be electric.

There are probably a lot of reasons. You are assuming there is no good reason, but obviously there is.

Electric delivery vehicles could easily be charged overnight from regular 'residential' outlet.

Since average mail route is 45miles [1]. At 1000Wh/mile - that's only 45kWh of charge needed per vehicle.

[1]https://www.grit.com/community/usps-rural-delivery-factoids

Probably more like 300Wh/mile. A Tesla Model 3 gets 4miles per kWh and that’s measured at higher average speed. At 3.3miles per kWh and 1.3kW for a typical L1 charger (literally just any standard 120V outlet), the average 45 mile range (13.5kW) would be charged in just 10 hours. With probably 14-16 hours charging each night, that's plenty to replenish greater than average usage as well. Put a 300 mile range battery in there, and you only need to charge once a week. (And note that the old Grumman LLV only had like 13.3 gallons and atrocious 10mpg, so that'd be like double the range and less frequent fuelings/chargings.)

"A Tesla Model 3 gets 4miles per kWh"

At cruising speed, I assume? Delivery is going to be radically worse, because it has a ton of start and stop operation, the worst case for consumption.

You also seem to be spec'ing what it looks like for a post office to recharge one vehicle. What about dozens, plural? A current post office needs only marginally greater power than a residence. Charging dozens of electric vehicles is going to need more than that.

10 vehicles, charged for 8 hours would draw 234Amps of current. About as much as single residential drop. Some houses even have 400Amp panels.

Given that USPS fleet would be upgraded over number of years - power delivery is really not a problem.

Roll down to your post office during off hours and count the number of trucks. I live in a very small city (people used to SF or NY wouldn't even call it a "city") and we've got dozens.

Not sure where you're getting the 1000Wh/mile number, but if it's from "normal driving" it won't apply. Mail delivery is stop and start, which is much worse. (If regenerative braking was 100% it'd be fine, but it's nowhere near that.)

Model 3 in Winter with heating on uses 420Wh/mile when driving 70mph. I think 1000Wh/mile is very generous estimate.

I think you are all greatly underestimating how much damage it does to drive down a neighborhood, stopping every hundred feet, and re-accelerating. Cruising speed consumption is not a useful number here.

Literally just need a 120V outlet.

You can’t tell me that exterior outlets are rare or expensive. The fuel saved in a single year would easily exceed the price of putting some exterior outlets in a parking lot.

I would assume they're already in half the parking lots in the North - block heaters would require outlets, so anywhere that gets below -20C would likely be able to have electric vehicles today.

Block heaters are only needed for diesel vehicles or areas with really low temperatures. I live in Michigan and the only block heaters I know of are used for school buses.

I guess I'm wrong. I assumed they'd be more common, given how everyone I know has one in southern Alberta (Canada). I thought America would be similar in areas to the North. Granted, -40 (which it gets to here) does count as really low.

Maybe not, but it's possible many post offices would need electrical supply upgrades to handle having their entire fleet plugged in all at once. Not impossible or even difficult, but not free either.

TBH I'd entirely support the NHTSA making the new mail truck's low hood height mandatory on all new vehicles. It would make being hit by an SUV have a far, far safer outcome.

“Over the past decade, automotive safety regulators in Europe have made pedestrian safety a priority. But their American counterparts have not adopted the same rules to protect people outside of vehicles. As pedestrian deaths rise alarmingly fast in the U.S., with nearly 6,000 lives lost last year, the difference between the American and European approaches to the regulation of car design stands out strongly.”

Source: https://usa.streetsblog.org/2017/12/07/while-other-countries...

Ironically pedestrian safety standards have generally raised hoods. The idea being that’s it better to not fling them up and over like a shovel

Plus wanting clearance between the hood and the engine block.

"Raised hoods" does not mean american truck hoods that hit you center mass, then throw you under.

Unless you are a kid of course, then not only will the driver never see you, trucks positively decapitate you.

I really like the look. In a few years everyone will forget about it being "weird".

Agreed! I don't know why everyone seems to think they look weird. They certainly look different, but I really like how they look.

It's weird because the front end looks like a typical sedan but everything from the windshield back looks like a box truck/van.

I agree. I think it looks neat.

No mention of increased crumple zone, which was probably the entire reason for the redesign in the first place? Sheesh. I assume the article was written entirely based on a press release together with a nice pack of product photos.

The previous models were injury/death traps.

These vehicles rarely make it above 40mph and the drivers often don't use seat belts.

Spending an extra hundred bucks per vehicle for a nice N-way adjustable seat or spending engineering hours making the seat-belts more convenient will have far greater benefits than throwing random safety technologies at it.

The previous models were designed in the 1980s. All 1980s work vehicles are/were death traps by modern clipboard warrior standards.

> These vehicles rarely make it above 40mph

That speed is quite deadly with zero crumple zone.

No. It's really not. Unless you're a frail elderly person (not the post office's hiring pool, this should go without saying). If you're wearing a seat-belt that's an "I'm sore the next day" speed.

If you're not wearing a seat belt then you're going through the windshield and it doesn't matter how the vehicle is equipped.

Yes, it actually is. Modern crumple zones on US market passenger cars are designed for 40mph crashes. The IIHS performs crash tests at speeds faster than any other crash worthiness program on the planet: 40mph. Every (routine) crash test video you've ever seen was at 40mph or less.

> These vehicles rarely make it above 40mph and the drivers often don't use seat belts.

A crumple zone is going to still help in that case (40mph head on with another car at 40mph is significant, crumple zones in both vehicles would help both occupants).

Was wondering why not cab-over-engine, I guess this is the answer.

Also wouldn't that raise the height of the driver's seat? Would make it harder to reach standard-height mailboxes from the driver's window.

>The previous models were injury/death traps

Particularly since they routinely swing in and out of the roadway without looking or even using their directional signals.

It's best to treat a mail truck on a roadway as a being of pure chaos, utterly unpredictable and capricious, if not always actively malicious.

"No mention of increased crumple zone"

Can't they just write "DO NOT BEND" in sharpie on the side?

The designer on Twitter seems to be a bit whiny about having utilitarian constraints. I actually think the truck looks like a truck made to do a job and do it well, thus it looks great to me.

If I could specify exactly what I want a vehicle to do, and have it designed for me, it would look weird too:

1. All electric

2. Can transport a double bass

3. But no bigger than necessary

4. Meets decent safety requirements

Real talk, my mom plays bass. We fit that, two adults, two kids, a pair of fiddles and backpacks for a weekend away: all into a Geo Metro. The trick is to put the neck down between the drivers with the rear seats folded down, and then fold them up. Wasn't terribly comfortable back there, but we were small enough to deal with it.

Oh. You edited your post to say "decent safety requirements". A '91 Metro probably doesn't fulfil that these days. But they'd probably do fine with an electric conversion.

Indeed, I drive a small, old Toyota hatchback right now. Mostly I get around town by bike. My spouse and I would like our next car to be an electric if this one ever gives out, but my fear is that all cars seem to be getting bigger and bigger.

My sister could fit a contrabasoon into a Toyota Matrix, but not anything much smaller; not sure if that would hold a bass.

I've always wondered certain vehicles were chosen for fleets. However the original mail truck always made sense to me. It was small, durable, and simple with it's OHV engine and solid rear axle. But what about other civil service cars? When I was growing up the de-facto Police vehicle and taxi cab was the Panther platform Ford Crown Victoria. A rear wheel drive, V8, large, lumbering, expensive, complex luxury sedan that mostly lives in cities such as Boston and NYC where it snowed half the year and rarely could ever go faster than 50mph. Yet almost unanimously everyone decided to go with the 12mpg option that had almost twice the moving pieces in it's engine as the competition with smaller engines.

NYPD uses Impalas

That's slightly better, but they have used Crown Victoria's in the past. Kind of hard to continue using them when they've long been discontinued.

But still, why the Impala? Why an 18mpg, FWD, 300hp transversely mounted engine design? Why kneecap yourself with a shit car? When do they use the full potential of the Impala, or the Crown Vic, or the EcoBoost Explorer? Even in the 90s and 2000s. Why not solicit contracts for custom vehicles? We could have had a 4d, 4WD Mitsubishi 3000GT Sedan Interceptor Edition. Instead there are enough Panther platforms cubed up in junkyards for every man woman and child in America.

It goes to show that the requirements for police vehicles are crafted by the police themselves. "We need a high performance, 2WD luxury car with... ahhh... three, NO four... yeah FOUR hundred horsepower!"

They've been using Impalas since at least 1996, but I guess they have a mixed fleet that also includes some Crown Vics:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Police_vehicles_in_New_York_Ci...

They have power because they need to chase things.

Basic fleet models would have gotten the base 200hp engine.

In an application with multi shift operation (like shared taxis) there is a lot to be said for an understressed v8.

Availability is likely worth more than a bit of marginal fuel cost - which likely didn’t see that many miles... lots of idling, which btw small turbo engines generally don’t like

I've done some thinking on this since my original post. The conclusion I came too is that the reason that police vehicles are de facto high end production cars is because of buying power.

The fed runs USPS so they buy 100% of the postal fleet. That's a lot of buying power. So much, infect, that companies will trip over each other trying to sell the fed their vehicles. The fed has all the chips, and can dictate practically every aspect of the final design including price and production rates. As the fed, the entire market is just YOU.

But local police departments are fragmented. They all face different budgetary challenges and their financial resources are divided. The market is crowded and suppliers are geographically splintered. The market for police vehicles is ripe for the car companies to divide and conquer. Why would they even make small cars with small engines when the margin on larger cars is better?

Maybe I'm wrong and there's more behind the scenes than meets the eye, but I think if police departments pooled their buying power into one cohesive purchasing entity that they would get more favorable deals from suppliers.

WOW those are cool. I'm excited to see the inevitable #vanlife conversions once civilians start getting their hands on them.

I wonder what they're going to do with the old vehicles that are being replaced. During the last replacement cycle, the used vehicle market was flooded with surplus Jeeps. One of my brother's friends got one for $12 at auction. They were inexpensive first vehicles for teenagers though not all that safe.

My understanding is that UPS scraps their vehicles once they've exhausted their usefulness, which is why you don't see used UPS vehicles driving around with the logo painted over. Would USPS do the same?

I'm guessing they wouldn't be strictly street legal for general use?

Demolition derbies are going to have lots of new crush stock.

I'm always in disbelief at the sheer volume of waste they deliver. I maybe get one meaningful or useful piece of paper a month, the rest is hundreds of pounds of paper, hauled by thousands of gallons of diesel fuel. How this organisation continues to exist in is current form is mind blowing. Nearly everything it hauls could be emailed.

And don't forget the cost to have trash trucks haul the thousands of pounds of waste away, also diesel powered.

It's the original "ad supported" business.

> It's the original "ad supported" business.

No, it's not. Ad-supported newspapers are older than postal mail being largely advertising subsidizing other mail. Older than the US Post Office (and the US, even in North America), too.

I disagree that the USPS shouldn't exist in its current form, but I am always dismayed at the quantity of mail I immediately chuck in the recycling bin (easily 95% or greater). I bet if USPS raised their bulk mail pricing, we'd have a lot less junk.

that in fact, is exactly what I'm talking about

They publish their revenue and expenses numbers [1]. The marketing mail junk revenues are around $150 per household, and equals to two pieces per day per household.

So it’s a lot of junk as you said, but it’s also a lot of money. I’d wager that less than 10% would pay that $150 annual fee for an “ads-free” model.

[1] https://about.usps.com/newsroom/national-releases/2020/1113-...

The new trucks are odd looking for sure, but when they're commonplace they'll just be "normal" just like the current LLV mail trucks.

I'm glad they went with a utilitarian design, seems better to have a truck that does exactly what they want for the lowest cost than to spend money making it look "better" but also more expensive and/or less useful.

Don’t these “bespoke design” make these tenders skyrocket in price? Couldn’t they have retrofitted a standard van?

These excesses - typically designed to feed the government undergrowth - remind me of what the early Thatcherites complained about.

I felt like this article could have been summarized in a single line.

Guess why the new mail truck looks 'weird'? PROJECT REQUIREMENTS such as view and mailbox accessibility.

I know this place has sunk a bit over the years but clickbait?

By the time they will hit the road or shortly thereafter, electric powertrain will be a better alternative to ICE (Internal Combustion Engine). Poor planning.

My local USPS are driving the Mercedes-Benz Metris van, which replaced the Grumman LLV. What I miss most is the low gear acceleration noise. It was distinct and more times than not, upon hearing this the vehicle outside was the mail truck. The Mercedes is stealth in comparison. The story is just funny right there, but for recent packages having been stolen while I was home. I miss the ‘windup’ LLV.

We have to wonder which way cause and effect are running:

https://i.pinimg.com/736x/5e/64/9b/5e649ba44cdc59c8c6f4a605c...

This made me wonder: has there ever been such a thing as brutalist car design?

(Meaning, a car designed for public services, exposing construction and functional requirements in a sculptural expression, which is not dictated by marketing requirements.)

The original jeep? Pretty much no ornamentation on these, lots of exposed structural parts, and most of the external coverings are practical (protective of the mechanisms and/or people in the vehicle). This basic design went directly into civilian service without any significant modifications (although the spartan aesthetic ended up being part of the marketing -- Willys even trademarked the grille design!).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Willys_MB

This may be a valid example (while I was thinking of excluding military vehicles, because these tend to have distinctive looks of their own.)

Here's a possible example, a Diamond Reo refuse truck, which also brings some to the sculptural aspects of brutalist design:

http://www.classicrefusetrucks.com/albums/WS/WS04.html

The article says the constraints couldn't be met any other way. Not requiring a bulky ICE engine in front of the cabin could remove the need for most of the ugly 'nose'.

This vehicle would be so much more adorable if they'd given it a more face-like front end, like an NA Miata, or anything more fitting to the Cars movie franchise.

We could create a cute USPS mascot and make it a job requirement to wear the costume. Japan has tons of them.

https://cdn.motor1.com/images/mgl/Y9p1j/s4/mitsubishi-minica...

I propose this eagle:

https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/61M%2BFV3aD...

I laughed, but I think the postal workers already put up with enough shit. No need to make them wear uncomfortable costumes.

It just seemed like a missed opportunity to make lemonade from these design constraints. Though maybe it'd be a safety issue to make the mail delivery vehicle excite the kiddos as much as my little old red miata does because it resembles Lightning McQueen.

I think it looks futuristic and pretty cool, sure it’s a utility vehicle, but it would look totally fine in a movie set in 2041, maybe I am weird.

last generation before self-driving trucks with robotic delivery arms?

true, parcels and overstuffed mailboxes would challenge robots, but the difference in cost would be so extreme, it would still be a net win... heck, you might be able to deliver mail more frequently, then send electronic notifications to users that their mailbox is full !

TL;DR because you haven't seen a vehicle optimized for this purpose in 30yr (i.e. since the LLV) and you're not used to seeing this particular instance of it yet.

USPS has an insane structure. Its leadership consists of government officials, but it gets 0 taxpayer funding, it's essentially a private company with government overhead. A fun-fact that its CEO, the "Postmaster General" is the second-highest paying position in the government after the President.

I'm reminded of the quote: "A camel is a horse designed by committee."

Isn't that kinda the opposite of the issue here? The people doing the designing were given strict requirements for heights and clearances; there aren't many designs that would have fit those requirements.

I want one to be my next vanlife rv. Seems the ergonomics are ideal.

That is the ugliest thing I have ever seen. Good lord.

Those windscreens look expensive

I think they look kinda cool

Oh god, it looks so cute.

Idk that shit kinda goes hard

Because platypuses are bottom-feeders that use their beaver-like tail to steer and their webbed feet to propel themselves through the water while hunting for insects, shellfish, and worms

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