Electrify the U.S. Postal Fleet!

November 1, 2018

Lindsay Brooke

The obsolete and “scary” LLV. My neighborhood’s mail carrier quips that her truck “is so ugly, dogs run away when they see me coming up the street.” The USPS should lead with new EVs.

They’re hot in the summer and cold in the winter, their drivers complain. Their sub-10-mpg fuel efficiency and emissions profile are stuck in the 1980s. On-board fires are not uncommon due to poorly routed fluid lines. With rear-drive only, their traction in slippery road conditions is “scary,” according to U.S. Postal Service carriers who brave rain, snow and gloom of night in the Long Life Vehicle — the familiar residential mail truck that is finally nearing replacement.

It’s hard to believe that some 140,000 of these rolling boxes, based on 2wd Chevy S-10 chassis and gasoline engines, were assembled by Grumman, maker of sleek F-14 Tomcat jet fighters. But the cheap-and-crude LLV was the USPS’s baby. Launched in 1986 for a 24-year lifecycle, it was given a six-year service extension in 2009. Then six years later the USPS kicked off its Next Generation Delivery Vehicles (NGDV) program to finally develop a mail truck for the 21st century.

The multi-year contract to deliver up to 180,000 new-gen mail trucks is reportedly worth more than $6 billion.

In 2016, the Postal Service awarded prototype development contracts to six OEMs: AM General, Karsan, Mahindra, Oshkosh, Utilimaster, and VT Hackney. AM General and Oshkosh, of course, are well-versed in the gov-spec space and the latter is collaborating with Ford for this program. Turkey-based Karsan is partnering with Morgan Olsen in Michigan in the competition. Singapore-affiliated VT Hackney is working with electric van newcomer Workhorse Group. The program calls for half the prototypes to be hybrid and alt-fuel vehicles. May the best solution win.

Testing under real-world duty cycles has been ongoing for the past year. Suppliers in the running tell me they’d expected the production contract to be awarded last month. That the officially independent USPS is running late here is not surprising, given Washington politics.

The new mail trucks will be ergonomically improved. They’ll also feature active and passive safety systems and telematics for precise delivery tracking. They’ll even have heat and A/C! A portion of the fleet is expected to have 4wd for snowbelt operations. All good. But the Postal Service’s failure to mandate battery-electric propulsion for the entire residential-delivery fleet is a strategic and tactical mistake.

EV mail service nationwide is a huge mobility-leadership opportunity for the U.S. Residential mail delivery is the ideal duty cycle for a battery-electric cargo van that runs the same route daily and returns to a terminal for overnight charging. For the USPS it’s a no-brainer. The technology is now sufficiently robust for widespread fleet use.

What better way to promote the reliable, durable, quiet, clean, and low-cost operation of EVs than to have them serving us daily in our neighborhoods?

Note to USPS: Skip hybrids, except for the most remote rural routes. It’s time to bring home the mail, electrically.