So weird, considering that mail delivery seems perfectly suited for EVs; the charging can be consolidated where trucks are parked overnight anyway.
The cost/time to bring up a production line for just these trucks doesn’t seem like it should be cheaper if their gas either. If anything, sharing a ‘skateboard’ with a delivery van or something would make it even easier.
Sure there are routes that would be unsuited for EV right now, but it should be closer to 90/10 than 10/90.
Also I'm surprised by how –there's no other way to put this– stupid this program is. According to page 38 of the environmental impact statement[1], they're planning on using 94kWh battery packs for the EV version of these vans, giving an expected range of 70 miles. This makes no sense. Ford already makes an EV version of its Transit vans with 67kWh batteries and 100+ mile range. Moreover the environmental impact statement notes this on page 43! These vans can carry more cargo than the planned USPS vehicle and they can be bought for $47k retail today. Purchasing the vans would almost certainly be cheaper at such high volumes, saving billions of dollars compared to the Oshkosh contract.
Considering the amount of waste, my guess is that this program is a way to help out a defense contractor (Oshkosh).
1. https://uspsngdveis.com/documents/USPS%20NGDV%20Acquisitions...
From a cost-benefit perspective gas is still king. Otherwise you’ll need 1.5-2x EV trucks for every one gas powered.
https://www.tesla.com/en_CA/customer-stories/electric-mail
With an EV, it’s a function of route distance, not route time. Minnesota gets pretty cold! Also, an EV costs half per mile of a combustion vehicle.
Your next rural mail carrier (where the vehicle decision is local) could be driving a Model Y!
If you're doing a grand total of a 100 miles in those 8 hours, you sure can - and city delivery vehicles will do even less than that. Yes sure it won't work if you're driving hundreds of miles every day - but even with postal services that's extremely rare, those are last mile delivery trucks not long distance transporters
Even if we assume non-stop 8 hours of driving (which it obviously isn't for mail delivery), that's only ~185 miles of range in the absolute worst case scenario.
Well within the range of a modern EV.
I think it's still fair at this point to think conversion of an enormous fleet of vehicles might not yet be the pragmatic choice.
The USPS doesn't even provide vehicles to a lot of rural route carriers; they get a stipend and have to purchase their own. They've been replacing LLVs with various sprinter vans and minivans for certain areas and route types.
They recently solicited designs for a new mail truck and that should have included drivetrain flexibility. Major car manufacturers have been doing this for at least half a decade, designing cars that are built to take an ICE, hybrid, or EV drivetrain instead of an EV or hybrid drivetrain being shoe-horned into a body only intended for an ICE drivetrain.
*Obviously it's not quite as simple as "boom" but you get the idea.
USPS is pretty smart/efficient with this stuff.
I would think that it would be pretty draining. Perhaps not!
I agree that the regen efficiency is reduced at lower speeds, but many EVs are perfectly capable of coming to a stop quickly on regen and only apply the friction brakes right at the end of the stop.
My standards for what qualifies as "strong" braking are probably bordering on alien for most people, too - about 95 feet for 60 mph to 0. That Tesla took almost 120 feet. A new Honda Accord takes about 130 feet.
Edit: https://www.greencarfuture.com/electric/tesla-one-pedal-driv...
The main issue with relying on regen is reduced regen power when the battery is cold. For a mail truck I think a stronger battery heater while plugged in, or a braking resistor to turn regen power into battery heat, would be helpful.
Maybe they should do a mix: EV urban, and gas rural.
$11.3 billion / 150 thousand trucks = $73k / truck
I don't think it's wise to focus only on money without considering other factors; however, when looking at decisions like this that don't make sense on the surface, especially when political factors are in play, money is very often going to be a driving factor.
Deciding that your surface level understanding of the problem coupled with some general concepts (ie money is often a driving factor), is enough to make a confident pronouncement on the issue is exactly self-inflicted thought suppression.
Another part of the problem is that when I do see people follow the money, they often come up with something like “the deputy undersecretary of the USPS’s brother used to work for Ford (as a mechanic at a dealership when they were in college)!” And then they treat that fact as if it overrules all the complicated forces that go into this kind of organizational decision-making.
So no, following the money is not a bad idea on paper. But in practice it’s often very sloppy, to the point that it’s frequently annoying when trying to have meaningful debate about policy issues.
And that is why it's thought suppression.
The USPS is ordering a fleet of trucks to operate in all of the United States of America from the Arctic Circle to Hawaii and the Florida Keys. They can’t just order EVs, they have to order the infrastructure to charge them and they need mechanics that can service them, and the trucks have to be able to operate anywhere the USPS deploys them.
Maybe that’s an argument for a mixed fleet, and there’s certainly room for criticism in any large government expenditure and of USPS itself, but it does not on the surface make no sense given that we still depend on USPS to deliver Mail to a service area that per Congressional mandate includes every address in America. Personally I think a mid-generation partial upgrade of the fleet to EVs would give USPS time to work out kinks, charging infrastructure and mechanic concerns without sacrificing the reliability of their service ahead of the generation after this one is probably the way to go.
The rollout doesn't have to be an all-or-nothing thing, and the article acknowledges that some EV's will be purchased.
Humorously enough, the primary reason cited by the USPS for the decision: $$$ (I realize that's not what the GP was implying)
The climate is changing is not a legitimate reason to over-spend, or worse: over-spend, over-promise and under-deliver. Anything they build today is bound to be safer and pollute less than their current fleet, so why hold up replacing the fleet when what they need from an EV practically doesn’t exist outside of exactly Tesla’s supercharge network?
Are these the reasons cited by the USPS?
As the article pointed out, a key ask was to focus on specific routes that are more suitable to EVs than others.
Every argument you’ve listed will always be a factor when moving to fundamentally new tech. They’re legitimate challenges, yes. But considerations the private sector is already sorting out.
Again, “it’s too hard” shouldn’t equate to “we aren’t even going to try (or even start piloting EVs to start making progress)”. This was unnecessarily forced to be an all-or-nothing rollout, which clearly doesn’t make sense in every region.
As far as overspending goes, there are some great threads elsewhere on this post that present some very reasonable phased approaches that address that.
I already preemptively addressed this, so you know I agree with you to an extent.
> Are these the reasons cited by the USPS?
You don't need to defer to USPS: a passing familiarity with EVs, the USPS's operations, mandates and the varied temperature extremes and climates they operate within (few countries are both as large as the US and have as varied a climate) will suffice. EVs presently handle extreme temperatures worse than ICE vehicles, and last I checked, most of the States have pretty cold winters and several have deserts. The bulk of their fleet will have to operate in most places all the time.
That said they do use different vehicles where it makes sense for them to, and per the article are also rolling out 5K EV vans. That's enough to start working with figuring out what they would need to eventually electrify the fleet while proceeding with regular business.
The actual reasons cited by USPS are also fairly practical: they have a contract in place, they don't need to stall it to give the President a win considering the age of their existing fleet is a more immediate concern, and the EPA has no say in the matter, but will consider purchasing more EVs if Congress provides additional funding for the purpose.
> Every argument you’ve listed will always be a factor when moving to fundamentally new tech.
USPS and its predecessor organizations has actually been on the bleeding edge for mail transport in the past, but there is value in taking a small "c" conservative approach to rolling out to new vehicle tech for last mile delivery, particularly when most mass market manufacturers still haven't even figured out both the vehicles and the charging infrastructure and you do need both. If the new purchase order could wait another 10 years, I'd be in wholehearted agreement with you. Maybe it even could, but I'm not seeing anyone making that argument.
Just as a last point, presently USPS burns about 110 million gallons of gasoline a year[1], but Americans burned about 123.73 billion in 2020[2]. The Postal Service is not where you want to have your climate fight for vehicle electrification because the juice just isn't worth the squeeze unless you value the politics more than the money. More than likely if the USPS continues to exist they will probably do a mid-generation transition or the next fleet they purchase will be all-electric because by that point it should be the more practical decision, unless something like Hydrogen fuel cells actually catch up to battery-electric vehicles by that point in terms of feasibility and deployed infrastructure.
[1] https://www.cnbc.com/2022/02/23/usps-moves-ahead-with-plan-t...
You think the kind of logic you expressed is an example of thinking, but it is literally thought suppression, because you are using it to try to get someone to stop thinking about a certain thing (following the money) and not giving them anything else to think about.
It's not free to switch to electric. Infrastructure costs like building charging stations and maintenance, labor costs like retraining drivers, and a huge number of other costs must be modeled before understanding the true economics.
Merely saying "someone is probably pocketing" demonstrates a shallow analysis of the situation.