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by lettergram 1573 days ago
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.

4 comments

https://electrek.co/2016/02/25/mail-man-tesla-model-s/

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!

>>You can’t drive 8 hrs on a single charge

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.

Well within the range of a modern EV.