Maybe the charging infrastructure isn't available?
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.
There's no way to do a project this big without phasing it in. The USPS has many tens of thousands of buildings.
And yes, installing service is "cheap" but it takes time.
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.
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.
And while 1% is too optimistic, you'd presumably install multiple outlets at a time.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I don't know if that sort of setup is commonly done or is allowed by code.
The average post office has six delivery vehicles if I did the math right.
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.
> 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.
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.