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.
Clearly USPS is trying to look after its employees, trying to ensure they have the best vehicle, suited for their work with minimal hassle.
More weirdness please. Looks great to me.
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.
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.
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)
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.
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).
My conclusion from watching is that it seems like safety is a design problem that not every mfg designed for.
Wish I could vote you up more than +1 to restore your karma.
No impact to knees. No impact from steering wheel. Comparable to normal cars with hoods.
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
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.
Jerry did not use his talents to the fullest extent.
I really wish there was a spin-off with only Newman & Kramer.
Kramen.
Stealing a regular person's car and crashing it isn't of much concern if you don't kill anyone.
What the hell are you going to do with a stolen mail truck? Everybody who sees it will know exactly where you got it
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
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.