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Comment by philwelch | Hacker News Reader

Is there an explanation for why the USPS needs custom-designed vehicles built by a defense contractor when every other last mile delivery company just buys ordinary vans and trucks?

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UPS trucks are custom designed for UPS; they used to have a nice documentary about it. New Amazon trucks around where I live are clearly custom (and also not very pretty, if you ask me).

New Amazon trucks are built by Rivian.

I saw a Rivian mobile service van for the first time about two weeks ago. I was behind it in traffic. It’s exactly the same design as Amazon, just different paint.

All I could think of was “they repainted an Amazon van“.

I know Rivian makes them all. But seeing so many Amazon vans has changed who “owns“ the design in my mind.

None have huge windows like this. Are the tasks that different?

Perhaps the next generation of UPS trucks will have large windows like the new USPS trucks. If it seems to be a useful feature, others will adopt it eventually.

It's very clearly a useful feature for seeing children while driving round residential areas, where they might be playing in the street.

Since it costs extra, Amazon will only adopt if if they're forced, either by regulation or significant social pressure.

UPS doesn't just buy ordinary vans and trucks.

'UPS Orders 10,000 Electric Vans from EV Maker You Probably Haven't Heard of' at https://www.autoweek.com/news/green-cars/a30716811/ups-order...

> "Together, our teams [at Arrival] have been working hard to create bespoke electric vehicles, based on our flexible skateboard platforms that meet the end-to-end needs of UPS from driving, loading/unloading and back-office operations,"

Didn't Arrival go bankrupt? https://fortune.com/europe/2024/02/06/british-ev-maker-value...

I think I have seen a youtuber who was buying some of the prototype UPS trucks on an auction: https://youtu.be/63R3mt61g_Y

Last mile delivery companies don't handle the volume of non-package traffic that the USPS does. At that scale, tailoring can really pay off in productivity.

Are you saying that the USPS delivering a handful of advertisements in addition to the odd package has greater demands than UPS/Fedex/Amazon delivering the bulk of the large packages in our society?

Not necessarily greater (though I'd think so, yes), but certainly different.

It’s definitely way more than a handful; spam makes up the vast majority of my USPS service by quantity and probably the largest share by volume.

Because they don't deliver to mailboxes on the curb opposite the driver in a LHD vehicle?

Name one last mile delivery company that doesn't have a purpose built van supplier? Amazon is getting Rivian to build theirs (after trying buying off the shelf)[1]. UPS uses a ford chassis but custom body work[2]. Fedex is perhaps the closest as they work with many manufacturers, but they have their vehicles custom built for them[3].

[1] https://www.aboutamazon.com/news/transportation/everything-y...

[2] https://www.reddit.com/r/Trucks/comments/ppo5tu/what_model_a...

[3] https://trucksauthority.com/who-makes-fedex-trucks/

French, German, Dutch, Swiss, British, Spanish etc etc etc post office, alongside DHL/FedEx/TNT/etc. in each of those?

I do not have detailed knowledge about the various national postal services you mention, but I suspect you also don't? The German post uses custom EVs[1].

If you really want to disagree please find a source that says a service uses off the shelf vehicles.

[1] https://www.greencarreports.com/news/1103326_germans-to-buil...

Sorry, made an outdated assumption about Germany in particular.

The French post office, a pioneer in EVs (they've used them on and off since the early 20th century) and until recently the biggest postal user of EVs, uses off the shelf vehicles like the Renault Kangoo: https://www.lemonde.fr/economie/article/2019/04/08/la-poste-...

They also use electric bikes for urban areas.

Royal Mail use a wide range of off-the-shelf vehicles. They don't seem to have any particular brand loyalty.

https://www.flickr.com/photos/76716069@N03/galleries/7215765...

I don't mean to say that delivery companies must only use custom-built vehicles - but that basically all services have some custom vehicles. As an example the Royal Mail does seem to use a lot of production vehicles, but they also are working with Arrival for what look like custom made delivery vans. You can compare the Royal Mail vehicle made by Arrival[1] and their generic landing page for their van sales[2].

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/DesignPorn/comments/iskdah/royal_ma...

[2] https://arrival.com/topic/van

They want to be able to buy the exact same vehicles for the next 40 or 50 years.

How is that a good idea?

They are testing "ordinary" vans as well. They purchased 6 Canoo vans[0] for testing and announced plan to buy 9000 Ford E-Transit vehicles[1] earlier this year.

[0] https://www.press.canoo.com/press-release/canoo-reaches-agre...

[1] https://media.ford.com/content/fordmedia/fna/us/en/news/2024...

seriously - what a waste of money. Guaranteed the maintenance is rife with corrupt arrangements. Also guaranteed that almost any American car manufacturer (Rivian, Tesla, Ford, etc.) would have done a far better job for far less. Did they even pretend to have a fair bidding system? Oshkosh Defense? Seriously?! What a joke.

How is this any different from the Grumman Long Life Vehicle it replaces? It worked well last time.

The only thing that comes to mind is maybe defense co. has experience building with indestructible materials, and the specs are for lasting 50 years, which when amortized is optimal for an entity like the government that can dump huge amounts of capital ($40B) at once that a private sector CEO can never do.

It is, to some degree, a jobs program. Whoever wins is guaranteed a lot of work for a long time. So contractors really want it.

I don't think Tesla or Rivian are used to working with government contracts. I'm not sure how much someone like Ford does either outside of mild customization. But defense contractors spend all their time working with the government, building to their specifications, handling the requirements and compliance/etc.

They're simply very very well equipped to work on such a contract.

They'd also be very used to making something for decades because that's what the government wants. Does Ford have a vehicle they make that's nearly unchanged for 30 years? I'd assume even the transit vans have changed a lot in that timeframe.

I think it’s mostly that defense contractors are specialized in selling to the government, which entails jumping through regulatory compliance hoops and placating elected officials by distributing the supply chain across as many congressional districts as possible.

Do you have any evidence or do you just feel like that?

There was a whole thing with proposals from multiple companies. Did any of those companies even bid? I don’t know.

It was all in the open. It’s not like they were just picked in secret without anyone else getting any consideration.

>Guaranteed the maintenance is rife with corrupt arrangements.

Any evidence of this, or are is this just verbal diarrhea?

>Also guaranteed that almost any American car manufacturer (Rivian, Tesla, Ford, etc.) would have done a far better job for far less.

Let's do the actual math.

Amazon's Custom Rivian Van costs $90k/vehicle.

The USPS has invested $9.6B to commission 106,480 new USPS vans.

That comes out to... $90k/vehicle.

>Oshkosh Defense? Seriously?! What a joke.

Yeah, the company that makes the majority of our military vehicles is unprepared for the task at making mail trucks. You're a joke...

How does making military vehicles make you qualified to build vehicles that drive in urban areas? These vehicles need to be safe for pedestrians, not emit excessive noise, exhaust etc. All these things are irrelevant for the military.

Yes, there was a bidding process, you can see some of the entrants that lost here: https://jalopnik.com/here-are-all-the-mail-trucks-that-didn-...

In any case, even if the process was terribly corrupt, I'm not sure why that would have you so bothered. Last sentence from the USPS press release on Oshkosh winning: "The Postal Service receives no tax dollars for operating expenses and relies on the sale of postage, products and services to fund its operations." https://about.usps.com/newsroom/national-releases/2021/0223-...

Both results are on the first page of a google search for 'usps truck bids'.

> The Postal Service receives no tax dollars for operating expenses and relies on the sale of postage, products and services to fund its operations.

The Postal Service has a legally enforced monopoly that it abuses to deliver literal metric tons of spam into our mailboxes every single day.

What law is it that prevents UPS/FedEx from carrying spam?

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