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.
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.
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)
It’s not an excuse: it’s a practical reason to not do a thing given finite resources. Somebody has to design the trucks, somebody has to manufacture them, someone has to service them, and somebody has to build the stuff that will charge them in a place the USPS can guarantee the availability of space for and security for their trucks, which practically means USPS or at least USPS adjacent property.
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?