I would love for these trucks to be EV’s as much as anyone, but I can see where USPS is coming from. Some selected quotes from the article:
The USPS did say that it plans to put 5000 electric delivery trucks into service starting in 2023 and claims that there is room for more EVs to be added to the mix "should additional funding become available."
“While we can understand why some who are not responsible for the financial sustainability of the Postal Service might prefer that the Postal Service acquire more electric vehicles, the law requires the Postal Service to be self-sufficient,” a USPS spokesperson told the Post in a statement.
Armchair take: If the EPA really wants these changes, they should be lobbying higher up the food chain in order to subsidize these EV’s in some way.
Its a BS quote, the deck was financially stacked against EV procurement from the start. For example:
1. EV proposals had to account for a 100% EV fleet. The small percentage of rural routes where this was difficult created a long tail of costs. There's no reason why this couldn't have been scaled down to a more reasonable 90% of routes (or whatever the breakdown happens to be).
2. TCO calculations were inadequate. The real benefit of EVs come from operating costs (much lower electricity costs compared to gas, much lower maintenance). Interest rates are so low right now, there would have been some way to capitalize the initial purchases, if the USPS leadership had appetite.
Yes, there's no way that the EV version should cost $30k more than the ICE version. It's possible to buy a whole EV for that price. It's not like you need a large battery to cover a 45 mile rural route.
still works that way even in the north end of the phoenix metro area in the foothills of the mountains, where we live. and this is not like the boonies, just the edge of suburbia abutted with mountains.
I don’t now why USPS what evaluate this on any other yard stick other than cost. It’s really hard to know exactly what their numbers look like but I have a hard time believing that their leadership is backwards etc like the epa rep would want everyone to believe. On the other hand I guess this could be a gambit for federal money. Either way it’d be great to see public thorough analysis.
This might be the lobbying. If so, just cut them a check for the EV cost delta and installing EV charging stations at USPS facilities where vehicles are parked.
Assuming outrageous costs (~$50k per usps branch) and 6000 USPS facilities, that’s $300M to install EV chargers. Say you do it over five years (slowly working from highest to lowest utilization geographies), that’s only $60M a year.
USPS spends $300M a year on fuel, and vehicle fuel accounts for half of their energy use. Per the GAO, USPS spends $2B a year maintaining their bespoke Grumman LLVs. The costs savings are blindingly obvious.
That's interesting, since electric vehicles should be cheaper in the long run -- especially if they can arrange lower prices for overnight charging.
Perhaps the up-front costs of an electric vehicle are prohibitive for their constrained financial situation. If so, that is an unfortunate bind, if it causes more financial costs in the long run.
> since electric vehicles should be cheaper in the long run
Do you have a reference for this? I'm curious to see where the costs went. For someone like USPS, who purchases mostly one model, in bulk, with long term maintenance as part of the plan, the math might be a little different.
My numbers may be a bit out of date, but I feel are still somewhat in the ballpark. A battery that gets you 300 miles on a charge (90 kWh?) can be charged 1500 times, and costs $20,000, so that is $13 of wear per charge, plus about $12 worth of electricity (probably more, just basing off battery capacity not counting charge / discharge losses). So that is $25 per 300 miles. A car that gets 30 miles/gallon will cost around $30 per 300 miles. So electric saves you ballpark about 16% in fueling costs.
I'm sure though that the battery packs will come down in price by the time they need replacing, on the other hand the charging costs may be higher due to thermal losses.
The average rural USPS route is 45 miles. Non-rural routes are closer to 20 miles. Low average speed (lots of stop and go) means they would likely beat what we are used to for EV energy usage per mile.
A 30kWh battery could probably handle most use cases even accounting for range loss in cold weather.
Edit: Also the USPS estimates the new gas-powered trucks will get ~8 miles per gallon with the A/C on, and ~14 miles per gallon with it off.
That would make your estimate closer to $16 per 300mi for the EV and $64-$112 per 300mi for the gas truck.
> In actual use by the USPS, which includes extensive stop-and-go driving for residential delivery, average fuel economy is about 10 miles per US gallon (24 L/100 km).[10]
The charging infrastructure is the real killer, you need 1:1 charger to vehicle or some kind of smart charger that can plug into X vehicles and charge each up overnight. There's also the power draw requirements that will take, so it may not actually be able to install sufficient charging on existing sites. There's also the maintenance on the chargers, which is admittedly small. Switching to EV means for the same budget you get say 20% less vehicles (assuming same cost), just because you have to spin up the charging.
Yes, this is a bigger policy and legislative failure that let the previous gen trucks get so old and the new contract go through without a mandate and funding for reduced emissions.
Because they spend the vast majority of their operating time stopping, idling, and accelerating at low speeds, . They are pretty much a worst case scenario for ICE efficiency.
But then the cars do not need to be electric! A hybrid with a small battery will suite this as well and, given the current price of batteries, will be cheaper.
... because the test driving cycle is based on 8 miles city, 6 miles freeway, and then 11 miles stop/go with 700 stops; and if I remember correctly is based on all accessories (i.e. air conditioning) running for the entire time.
This is not your EPA passenger vehicle test cycle.
> Cars are most fuel efficient when they're rolling about 50MPH.
They're even more efficient rolling at 40 MPH or 30 MPH or even 20 MPH, as long as it's consistent (not stop-start). Air resistance scales with something like the cube of velocity and begins to be noticeable around 20 MPH.
Efficiency is easy to ball park, but if you want to get precise then every vehicle is going to have it's own moving target. I would argue that no vehicle is especially efficient at 20mph for long durations. Sure you have no air resistance, but you also are spinning a 6 speed transmission when you really only need one. 90% of the car is being wasted. You might as well just drive a self propelled lawn mower.
Even two vehicles of the same make will be different due to differences in operating conditions.
An ICE engine, especially gasoline powered ones, operate with widely varying levels of efficiency. Lets think of a car in 4th gear at 50mph with 15% throttle applied. Now imagine climbing a steep hill. The car can stay in 4th gear and climb the hill with 65% throttle, or downshift to 3rd and climb the hill with 45% throttle. Speed alone doesn't determine fuel efficiency. Intake vacuum (or boost in certain applications) determines fuel efficiency. The trick is to try to go as fast as you can while consuming the least amount of fuel. There is nothing "efficient" about driving a 250hp, 3.0L V6 at 20mph.
It's the reason why vehicles have a separate "city" and a "highway" fuel economy rating, since the former takes into account the expected stopping and starting you do in city traffic which you would not on an uncongested highway. It also makes intuitive sense if you understand physics: in a non-hybrid ICE vehicle, you impart energy from the engine into the wheels to accelerate the vehicle and you impart energy from the wheels into the brakes to decelerate, effectively wasting the original energy from the engine as heat. In hybrids and EVs some of that energy can be recovered by using the motor as a generator to recapture it in a useful form.
Wouldn't it be more-so that with ICE vehicles you loose 100% of the kinetic energy as heat when stopping. With an EV you convert a portion back to the battery packs with regenerative breaking.
Not trying to be rude, but it's because it's intro Physics (F=m*a, with F coming from fuel, battery, or brakes), with an understanding that the process that generated that force has an efficiency that's less than 100%, mixed with a dash of intro Calculus (integral of force).
Unsure why USPS wouldn't look up to another company that is all based on logistics and delivery. If Pepsico is already buying Tesla Semi trucks af of last Q of '21 [1] then they clearly did the homework and decided electric trucks makes more economical sense than other means. After all, Pepsico as a publicly traded company, is all about squeezing the last cent out of the cost of freight.
The USPS delivers mail in both urban and rural, famously, regardless of the climates of those locations. I still think EVs are a generation short of being able to be deployed in this type of "long life" fleet, and I'm not sure there is enough manufacturing capacity to build the fleet fast enough for the USPS.
The average USPS rural route is 45 miles, well within the capability of even the lowest end EVs especially given the low average speeds and constant stop-and-go with regen braking.
Sure there are routes that would be unsuited for EV right now, but it should be closer to 90/10 than 10/90.
Probably a mix would make most sense. In shorter routes electric with capacity to charge during downtimes makes sense. For very long ones gas isn't bad option.
USPS already has different vehicles for different routes. It seems like the best solution would be EVs in urban areas and gasoline for long routes (at least until EVs improve). That said, I'm not sure why the postal service needs unique vehicles. Using an existing vehicle platform seems like it would be significantly cheaper and lower risk. That's what postal services in other countries do. The same goes for delivery companies like DHL, FedEx, UPS, and Amazon.
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).
re: manufacturing. They’re only looking at buying 150k trucks. Even Tesla (famously more valued than their output) has a run rate of over a million per year now. So I’m not thinking that’s really an issue.
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.
Not that weird when you consider that purchasing EVs also means purchasing and deploying the infrastructure to charge them. That’s not a small operation for a service area that includes every single address in the United States of America.
Fair, but would you prefer that money be spent assisting USPS with a pilot program which won’t necessarily be useful nationwide or assisting people and businesses who live in your area to switch to electric cars themselves?
You can’t drive 8 hrs on a single charge. Particularly in colder climates with less population density. My mail is delivered by someone driving a jeep down a creek lol
From a cost-benefit perspective gas is still king. Otherwise you’ll need 1.5-2x EV trucks for every one gas powered.
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
My mail is delivered by a guy who parks halfway down the block, walks to 20 houses or so, then moves the truck every 20 min or so. I doubt he spends more than a half hour driving every day. Obviously rural routes should not use EVs yet but this is not the majority of mail delivery.
Your average car commutes at somewhere between 22 and 24 mph.
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.
There would also be a considerable infrastructure charge at every post office and practical considerations of being able to supply adequate materials to actually build all of the mail trucks... on top of that batteries which will degrade, especially faster as some mail vehicles will be used > 100 miles a day.
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.
So make that infrastructure publicly accessible during the day and BOOM* you just deployed a publicly funded charging network across most of the country.
*Obviously it's not quite as simple as "boom" but you get the idea.
EVs slow down by generating power and putting it back in the battery. Many EV owners report brakes lasting 100k miles or more due to the reduced usage.
Regen braking is extremely weak and takes a much longer distance than you'd imagine to bring the car to a complete stop. The best use-case for it is slowing from high speeds to moderate speeds, whereby the deceleration is greatest and the recharging is most powerful. For instance, imagine exiting an 80 mph highway onto a 40 mph access road. It's worth noting that the rate of deceleration on regen brakes decreases as the speed approaches zero, rather than the reverse as with non-thermally-overloaded friction brakes. Fundamentally, this occurs for the same reason that stopping a given car from 120 mph takes more than twice the distance compared to stopping the same car from 60 mph - part of the equation of calculating the kinetic energy (what's powering regen brakes) of a moving vehicle involves squaring the speed of the vehicle. With this in mind, braking duty cycle of a typical urban or suburban mail truck (which does a lot more 25-0 than 80-40), is pretty much the worst possible duty cycle for use alongside regen brakes - you are getting almost no energy back and almost no braking force in this specific duty cycle.
stop/go/stop/go is perfect for regenerative braking at the very least(not necessarily limited to EVs, but more common with them than ICEs). Also, on the stop portions, there would be zero emissions. I imagine the stop portions are probably a bigger overall part of the day than the go portions, at least based on how my mailman operates.
> People think this kind of logic is an example of thinking, but it's actually thought suppression.
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.
"follow the money" would actually give you the opposite conclusion.
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.
Explain this comment to me. It seems reasonable to come to the conclusion that someone is profiting on the side from this deal. Especially given the current postmaster general. Is there some other trail of thought you think is being neglected from jumping to this conclusion?
Yes, any deal would involve someone making a profit but that isn't important. The question "follow the money" implies is, was this decision made because it was the best decision for the circumstances or was it made because someone is getting a kickback? I don't know the answer and I'm not implying anything but I feel saying "any deals involves someone making money" is being obtuse to a certain extent.
Would you expand on why you believe this to be true?
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.
Part of the problem is that people say “I’m telling you someone’s making a buck, just follow the money”, then they don’t actually follow the money. For many people, it’s enough to just say that catchphrase and not even bother looking into it. The argument wins itself.
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.
To clarify my parent comment, I'm not advocating for blindly resorting to "follow the money", and I acknowledged that. But your response is actually substantive and delves into some of the pitfalls of this kind of thinking, which was missing from the GP, and really what I was asking for.
If you have a surface level understanding of a problem and don't understand the proposed solution, then the best path forward is to dig a little deeper and understand the problem better, or just move on with your life and accept that you can't know everything about every field.
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.
I was not suggesting one use "follow the money" as a default. I was reacting to the parent comment that dismissed the idea entirely without explaining why.
> when looking at decisions like this that don't make sense on the surface
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.
These are all great points, and certainly highlight some of the challenges in rolling out EVs. But at a time when the climate crisis is as severe as it is today, "it's too hard" can't be an excuse. I'd still argue that this decision doesn't make sense in the context of the global problems we face today, even if they make some sort of tactical sense in the short term.
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)
Give me a break. If the admin wants the postal service to go EV, pay for it. The very fact that the USPS remains solvent under the conditions they are forced to operate is a damn miracle. Put up or shut up.
WASHINGTON, Feb 8 (Reuters) - The U.S. House of Representatives overwhelmingly approved a bill on Tuesday to provide the Postal Service (USPS) with about $50 billion in financial relief over a decade and requiring future retirees to enroll in a government health insurance plan.
With the current state of things with news agencies, we need to assume these are carefully handpicked facts that give a false impression. Those 50 billions likely come with lots of strings attached and USPS can't just use 5 billions per year; the bill was riddled with irrelevant provisions that have nothing to do with mail, and that senator's vote didnt really decide anything. Need to verify all this to make any conclusions.
we need to assume these are carefully handpicked facts that give a false impression
Reuters and AP are some of the most unbiased and professional news sources that cover US politics. If you are going to spread uncertainty and doubt about what I consider to be comprehensive reporting on this bill, I expect you to back it up with actual evidence.
This administration has a majority in both houses and rather than doing anything with it, is tying their hands behind their back in defense of some absurd concept of "norms" which the other side has made abundantly clear they stopped believing in ages ago. Believe what you want but "the big meanie republicans are screwing everything up" stopped carrying any water for a lot of us some time ago.
> Give me a break. If the admin wants the postal service to go EV, pay for it. The very fact that the USPS remains solvent under the conditions they are forced to operate is a damn miracle. Put up or shut up.
From the article:
> President Biden's social spending package proposal unveiled last year included $6 billion for the USPS to purchase new vehicles, but that proposal is still being debated in Congress.
So it looks like the administration has, in fact, tried to "put up".
> Shouldn't they secure that funding before they require this?
Are you under the impression that the Biden administration has required that the USPS go with EVs? Because that doesn't seem to have happened. If you are referring to some other requirement, maybe you should clarify what you're talking about.
I really think this is a best-case scenario for a hybrid. You get EV-ish efficiency in the city, a decrease in wear on mechanical parts, especially things like brakes, and no range related issues that come with a BEV - if using hybrid SUV's as a datapoint, modern hybrid systems even get better MPG on the highway then their gas counterparts.
It's clear that if you buy a consumer vehicle, the extra cost a hybrid pays quickly off over the course of ownership, and maintenance isn't nearly as expensive as it was when the came out 20 years ago.
I totally get why hybrid 18-wheelers don't exist - there's very little stopping involved, so the benefits of the regenerative braking, and the off-the-line electric efficiency are null, but USPS trucks have to stop hundreds of times per trip.
Modern day hybrids are fuel efficient, generally more powerful then their gas counterparts, and are bullet-proof enough to be used as taxi cab fleets in NYC. Someone's going to say that you need to haul a bunch of stuff. The F150 Hybrid gets 25mpg vs the 20mpg of the gas. It really doesn't make sense to me.
I had for few years Yaris hybrid from Toyota. It turned out maintenance was costly due to a design bug. Yaris had advanced regenerative braking similar to Prius. As the result the brakes did not get hot. In turn under rainy Norwegian weather that lead to accumulation of water that was not evaporated as with normal brakes. That lead to extensive rust within a year. This was not problem as I learned in Prius or for that matter in electrical cars. Those were sufficiently heavier to offset this. But Yaris was light.
I have the strong impression that the current fleet of LLVs are, at this point, each an individual work of patchwork art, still moving only due to the constant attention of dedicated genius grade mechanics. But that would not be possible had they not been built, intentionally, with some of the most common and vanilla parts available.
A new fleet that uses parts nothing else does will be an expensive boondoggle destined for quick sale as surplus.
I can understand not switching 100% all at once, but it seems like they'd want to stick their foot in the water and try it out in some ideal areas.
As someone who lives in an area that is outside the norm (postal vehicles aren't the standard issue), it wouldn't be a good idea here - but they have to be perfect for somewhere...
IIRC, this design does allow for switching over to manufacturing an EV powertrain relatively easily. Not sure if this is also true for conversion of already built vehicles but even if not, over time attrition would move most over to EV.
If we switched to EVs, how would I know the mail is near without the sound of a vehicle accelerating as fast as it can and then to braking as hard as it can every fifty feet? /s
The Postal Service will spend up to $11.3 billion on a fleet of 90-percent gasoline-powered trucks and 10-percent electric trucks. That is seriously imbalanced given the lifecycle expectancy of these vehicles. It should be more like 75% PHEV, and 25% gasoline.
They must be paying for these with the funds from not having to install mailboxes. We found out the law changed recently and now communal mail boxes are no longer their responsibility which is crazy.
Note that this is at the order of Postmaster General Louis DeJoy, who was appointed to the post by Trump in 2020. The same one who slowed down the mail service around the election and is the founder CEO of XPO logistics, which is a huge conflict of interest. The Biden administration directed USPS to go electric, but they are quasi-independent.
Given the failures and complaintslast year, why does he still have that job? From wikipedia it seems like the politics around the board selecting the Postmaster General even being functional seem to have been difficult in the past years, is that the main reason?
The USPS did say that it plans to put 5000 electric delivery trucks into service starting in 2023 and claims that there is room for more EVs to be added to the mix "should additional funding become available."
“While we can understand why some who are not responsible for the financial sustainability of the Postal Service might prefer that the Postal Service acquire more electric vehicles, the law requires the Postal Service to be self-sufficient,” a USPS spokesperson told the Post in a statement.
Armchair take: If the EPA really wants these changes, they should be lobbying higher up the food chain in order to subsidize these EV’s in some way.