12 ms·

It's interesting that "cost" is the reason given for why these vehicles aren't electric, but... how could that be? Batteries for electric carmakers are not that

It's interesting that "cost" is the reason given for why these vehicles aren't electric, but... how could that be? Batteries for electric carmakers are not that expensive any more, maybe $150/kWh. LLVs are currently horrendously inefficient (fleet average of about 9mpg). They have a ~13 gallon tank for a range of about 120 miles. They drive about 18 miles a day on average (total fleet average, so some are idle and probably the typical route is 45 miles, but 18 miles is good for our purposes) and burn 2 gallons of gas. At $3/gallon, that's about $6 a day in fuel costs (and let's ignore brakes and oil changes). We could put a 75kWh battery in that thing, easily get 250 mile range (double the range of what the LLV is). For an efficiency of about 3.33 miles per kWh, and an average commercial electricity price of 11 cents per kWh, that's 59 cents per day in electricity cost. So every day, the electric one would save $5.40 in fuel costs (net). Even with that generous 75kWh battery, you're talking just 6 years for it to pay for the electric battery to pay for itself in fuel costs vs the old vehicle. And these things are designed to last for multiple decades, plus this will drastically reduce oil changes and brake servicing costs. Are they really that cash strapped they'll ignore something that can save them that much? The US federal government definitely isn't strapped for cash. Does this really boil down to punitive fiscal requirements for the USPS put on by Congress and DeJoy? Because if so, that's inexcusable. Or perhaps no one bid a competitively low price for an electric powertrain?

s0rce 6y ago
Maybe the charging infrastructure isn't available?
- Robotbeat 6y ago
  A literal 120V exterior outlet? 83% of these vehicles drive in the city. They drive on average 18 miles a day (typical routes being about 45 miles). You don't need a 150kW Supercharger station, you just need a 1.2kW regular old 120V exterior outlet used for trimming the bushes. Even a cheap RV hookup would be overkill. If a federal government agency in the most powerful national on the planet can't take the most obvious step toward electrification in a case which is the best possible situation for an electric vehicle (very stop and go traffic, slow speeds, short routes, long total miles on odometer over life of vehicle), what hope does the rest of the world have in taking action on climate? Greta Thunberg is right. People don't care about climate. Literally everything else is a priority.
  - kube-system 6y ago
    Yes, there are probably very few outlets where mail trucks currently park. These things are parked in the middle of parking lots, not in garages. And you need more than one outlet, you need one for every truck that parks there. And I am sure no current USPS office has power service hooked up for several hundred amps of draw that was never anticipated to be used. There's no way to do a project this big without phasing it in. The USPS has many tens of thousands of buildings.
    - Robotbeat 6y ago
      These vehicles ARE being phased in slowly. And installing 100-200 Amps of commercial service is cheap, and I actually think would largely be unnecessary as they can be set to charge at night when office demand is super low.
      - kube-system 6y ago
        Does the electric code permit overallocation in that case? That's not my area of expertise but I doubt it does. And yes, installing service is "cheap" but it takes time.
        Robotbeat 6y ago
        It takes way less time than building these vehicles will and can be done cheaply with local electricians. It’s strange how common magical thinking about EVs is, like electricity is this newfangled thing that we don’t understand and need massively new, poorly understood infrastructure. We don’t. And that’s a huge advantage.
        kube-system 6y ago
        I am not saying and have not said electricity is the hard part. The logistics of steering the world's highest volume postal operation (with financial issues as it stands) is the hard part. The USPS handles 43% of the world's mail. There are no projects of this size that aren't phased in, which is apparently what they are doing. Some of these vehicles will be electric, so it stands to reason that they will also be building out the equipment and processes required to roll them out.
- ratsforhorses 6y ago
  Just putting this out there.."Adapting a lamp post into a charging point for electric vehicles can cost as little as £2,000" Seems like a good infrastructure project ...
  - Robotbeat 6y ago
    2000 pounds? Try $200 maybe. And these vehicles cost on the order of $40k. Penny wise and pound foolish to spend thousands of dollars on a combustion engine and drivetrain just because you're afraid of a $200 exterior outlet.
    - lesdeuxmagots 6y ago
      $200 won’t even cover the cost of the electrician’s labor. And beyond just the cost of materials and labor to actually do the thing, consider the cost of the consultation on what is actually possible for a given location, the time and cost of permitting, the time involved in all the paperwork such as the drafting and filing of the plans, etc. This isn’t and informal process like some exterior facing outlet you decide to add to your home as a weekend project after looking up a YouTube video and doing a Home Depot run. Then there’s all the aggregate costs associated with switching. Maintenance of an EV requires different skills and different tooling. Establishing new or amending existing maintenance contracts, training new mechanics or retraining old ones, rewriting guidelines, purchasing new tools and equipment, etc. Many hundreds of thousands of dollars of costs per region. And you’re going to do that across far-flung areas of the US, many which have a current EV install base near or at zero? They have to work to transition this across tens of thousands of locations, while not jeopardizing the delivery of hundreds of millions of pieces of mail a day. And you’re going to suggest that they NOT take a slow phased approach? To transition one of the largest fleets of vehicles in the world? Please. Consider for a moment you may be wrong. That things are not as simple as you think. That when every single person is trying to explain why, you shouldn’t automatically attempt to find ways to dismiss or invalidate what they have to say.
m463 6y ago
from the other linked article: > While some will be EVs, some of the NGDVs will come with modern, fuel-efficient internal combustion engines. As electric vehicle infrastructure improves, these NGDVs will be able to be retrofitted with the battery-electric powertrain later on.
- Robotbeat 6y ago
  That doesn't make any sense. All the "electrical infrastructure" needed to drive the typical 45 mile route is a regular old 120V exterior outlet. The retrofit cost is going to probably be double the marginal cost it would've been to just make it electric in the first place. Whoever is making these decisions either wasn't given competitive bids or they're poorly informed about electric vehicles.
  - shkkmo 6y ago
    I suspect there is a high level of variance in both the length of different routes and the availability of power in parking areas for mail trucks.
    - Robotbeat 6y ago
      Grumman LLVs only have a 120 mile range. This is already double. And sure, maybe you’ll want an RV style outlet (also pretty cheap) in case of 5% of vehicles where 120V wouldn’t be enough.
      - TylerE 6y ago
        The LLV can refuel in 5 minutes at over 160,000 public locations.
        Dylan16807 6y ago
        It sure can! That's also much much more flexibility than it needs. For a low-mileage fleet vehicle it's deep into diminishing returns.
fshbbdssbbgdd 6y ago
It seems like you are comparing a theoretical modern EV to the terrible efficiency of the old LLV. They didn’t choose to continue buying the old LLV, they are buying a vehicle with a new ICE. So the comparison makes little sense.
- gibolt 6y ago
  Repair and maintenance are probably far more expensive than the gas costs, especially as a government contract. Gas prices will also increase as demand falls of a cliff over the coming decade. Electric wins on all fronts in cost, simplicity, and city health
  - fingerlocks 6y ago
    I doubt maintenance & repair costs be more expensive for an ICE engine. The actual engine part requires little maintenance: occasional oil changes each year, spark plugs every five years, and maybe a belt in 10 years? I guess brake pads might be more common, but those are still a once every few years thing and inexpensive. All other common repair items would the same for an EV: suspension, various ball and CV joints, tires, AC, body damage, sensors, bushings, etc
    - elygre 6y ago
      I sometimes try to find an article I’m sure I read here at hacker news. It said something to the effect that the top ten wearables on a ICE car, measured by revenue in the auto shop market, don’t even exist on an electrical vehicle.
      - fingerlocks 6y ago
        Well that’s hard to believe, unless you pedantically itemize every tiny little thing. For example, a single oil change typically requires a new oil filter, a new crush washer on the drain plug, oil, possible additives, and sometimes an air filter swap. So that’s five items right there, but we’re still talking only 20 minutes of work and $50 of maintenance.
IncRnd 6y ago
> They drive about 18 miles a day on average The LLVs don't drive for an hour a day and sit in the parking lot turned off for 23 hours a day. Many routes might be 6 hours or more. You need vehicles that have AC or heat and the ability to run for an entire day. The differential cost for such a vehicle is not the cost of a battery. I'm not saying the current purchasing process is waste-free, but you need to use realistic numbers. The longest route is about 185 miles in Phillipsburg, KS. There are averages, medians, and modes, none of which are the right numbers. The average isn't as important as probable mileage. For example, say a bus carries a maximum of 80 people. When 10 people get on your bus, your costs aren't 12%.
- Johnny555 6y ago
  Carriers on many rural routes use their own vehicles. My parent's carrier drives a Subaru Outback
  - IncRnd 6y ago
    I hadn't even contemplated that. Thank you. That's an important use case.
elihu 6y ago
Even a 75kWh battery would be expensive and heavy, and probably overkill in this case. If 100 miles of range is more than enough for most routes for the day, then something like 30kWh might be more reasonable. Also one might be able to keep costs down by optimizing for cost rather than energy density. LiFeP04 cells have been comparatively expensive, but it seems price has been dropping lately. It's also a good choice for safety and durability reasons, and because they don't use cobalt which is sort of expensive and sort of rare. Not using cobalt means avoiding a resource that would bottleneck other manufacturers of EVs. It'd be interesting to know what the actual specs are on the EV version of the USPS vans (battery type, capacity, etc...) and see if my speculation corresponds to what they chose. I don't know if they've released that publicly yet. A 30kWh battery could easily be 5 or 10 thousand dollars, which may well be worth it to save on gas for a long time; on the other hand, gas engines are well-understood and really cheap, because we have a huge established industry that builds engines by the millions and has been optimizing for cost for over a hundred years. This sounds a lot like the "Captain Samuel Vimes 'Boots' theory of socioeconomic unfairness" from Terry Pratchett that generally eventually gets quoted in this sorts of discussion. https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/72745-the-reason-that-the-rich-were-so-rich-vimes-reasoned https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/72745-the-reason-that-the-r...
- jfoutz 6y ago
  I think it’s more about timing. Rfp in 2015, the ev landscape was different, and not super clear battery technology would be where it is now.
  - solarkraft 6y ago
    To some people it was. I have wondered then and I wonder now how it wasn't clear.
    - buran77 6y ago
      Between all the people looking at a problem you'll probably get every possible solution and one (or more) of them could be correct. Hindsight reinforces that opinion and makes it look more certain than it was at the time. But would you have bet the farm for your assumption then? It's easy to "see the future" when you have no risks to consider.
cycomanic 6y ago
That's essentially what the German Post did. They developed their own all electric van the streetscooter. Unfortunately they could not turn it into a viable business and sell enough units to others, so they shuttered the operation last year. Quite unfortunate, because I believe the project was well ahead of its time.
- moooo99 6y ago
  iirc German Post didn't really develop the Streetscoter [1] themselves, instead they acquired the company that did. It was a start up lead by a professor from university Aachen and from what I can remember, they had quite a lot of problems besides the ones you mentioned. There were a lot of recalls and other problems, especially towards the end of the company [2] The post employees also often complained about the relatively high loading edge for the storage box, which makes it super hard to load and unload heavy packages. Regardless of the problems, I think it was a really good idea and a rather cool looking vehicle. And when it comes to urban streets in Germany, the street scooter probably was the perfect vehicle when it comes to space requirements. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/StreetScooter https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/StreetScooter [2] (German) https://www.businessinsider.de/gruenderszene/allgemein/streetscooter-probleme-im-winter/ https://www.businessinsider.de/gruenderszene/allgemein/stree... [3] (German) https://www.elektroauto-news.net/elektroautos/streetscooter-groessere-problemen-als-bisher-geahnt https://www.elektroauto-news.net/elektroautos/streetscooter-...
  - froh 6y ago
    and they developed it it "by themselves" i.e. by a company they acquired for that purpose, because neither the volkswagen group, nor mercedes/daimler were able or willing to just shipmelectric local delivery mini vans. last year deutsche post lost two streetscooter CEOs for "diverging opinions on the future of streetscooter". deutsche post is now trying to sell their subsidiary.
- kwhitefoot 6y ago
  Th Norwegian Post Office uses electric vehicles. I saw one in the street in Drammen this morning. See https://elbil.no/posten-elbil/ https://elbil.no/posten-elbil/
Adrig 6y ago
ITT people arguing that a country with $7 trillion of spending budget can't install a few power outlets in its post offices.
- AlgorithmicTime 6y ago
  The USPS isn't funded from tax dollars, it's funded by delivery fees.
- jerry1979 6y ago
  I don't think that spending really goes to the post office tho.
- Mauricebranagh 6y ago
  cough the unjoin'd up and fragile nature of the US Grid might also be a problem.
- INTPenis 6y ago
  The US is massive and its grid of infrastructure can't always keep up. But you're right that cities should have electrical USPS vehicles. Dominoes here have electrical bikes in city locations, why can't the post office have electrical cars?
- AnIdiotOnTheNet 6y ago
  Congress, specifically Republicans in congress, hate the post office and would like nothing better than to see the whole institution burned to the ground and replaced with private business.
totalZero 6y ago
It seems to me that a parcel-laden EV that starts and stops repeatedly will still be pretty lossy -- ie, the effective fuel efficiency will be quite low compared to typical EV city driving because regen doesn't work quite so well for precise stops. You're still going to engage the brake pads for a full stop in front of every mailbox. Also, maintenance would probably be more expensive if you have to train people to work on the electric powertrain. But presumably they could always modify the powertrain in a future iteration.
- solarkraft 6y ago
  And somebody think about the extra load on the power grid! It's not that these aren't valid concerns, they have to be addressed, they're just so minute they don't change the calculation even slightly. EVs at that speed may lose a bit more (already more efficiently generated and used) power in regen - vs. a guaranteed 100% loss on a gas vehicle.
  - totalZero 6y ago
    We already know there's a guaranteed loss on ICE braking. If that were the only difference between ICE and EV then I would totally agree with you...BUT Cost/benefit analysis comparing ICE and EV changes wildly if the effective range of the vehicle is lower and the comparable fuel efficiency is not enough to justify the additional costs of EV. These are fleet vehicles that get deployed all across the country, and they have to be serviced, moved, etc...I doubt the choice not to go EV was an oversight, considering that fleet has been one of the beachhead markets for alternative-energy vehicles.
BCM43 6y ago
Aaron Gordon at Vice gives some explanations - most important cost-related bit seems to be they weight upfront cost a lot more than amortized cost, and non-electric does better on that front. https://www.vice.com/en/article/3an4k8/dont-expect-the-usps-fleet-to-go-electric https://www.vice.com/en/article/3an4k8/dont-expect-the-usps-...
- blaser-waffle 6y ago
  Everyone hates OpEx, even Feddy'Gov.
- a9h74j 6y ago
  Weight-per-wheel also figures into wear inflicted on local roads.
ffdhghggg 6y ago
People on HN are technical, so we're discussing technical reasons. However, that's not really how the government works. USPS leadership had instructions to electrify the fleet. For whatever reason, they decided they didn't want to. Maybe they didn't want to deal with a risky change, maybe they thought it would hinder meeting their other obligations. Doesn't matter. They decided they didn't want to do it. Their next step is then to write requirements in their rfp such that they can select a contractor that cannot meet the electric mandate. This allows them to legally pass the buck for the electric thing to their contractor, who will get paid big dollars to "develop" electric vehicles that their customer doesn't want. Congress gets to brag about their environmental contributions, USPS gets the vehicles they want, and the contractor gets a sizable sum to do nothing. Win-win-win.
- Mauricebranagh 6y ago
  I suspect they where afraid of push back from the previous administration as well. I am surprised they didn't look at using LNG instead of petrol.
johnwalkr 6y ago
It’s too bad, a massive fleet built to spec, with central fueling and maintenance locations is a perfect use case for electric now even though we are potentially a long way from charging stations as convenient as gas stations.
rtkwe 6y ago
They would also need to provide infrastructure for charging the fleet, possibly multiple times a day depending on what the routes look like, which is a significant cost if they want to do more than one battery worth of a route in a day, even if they did have short enough routes that they could do overnight charging for everything that's still a lot of power draw and would need expensive electrical upgrades. Sticking with gas there's no further infrastructure investment required.

s0rce 6y ago

Maybe the charging infrastructure isn't available?

Robotbeat 6y ago
A literal 120V exterior outlet? 83% of these vehicles drive in the city. They drive on average 18 miles a day (typical routes being about 45 miles). You don't need a 150kW Supercharger station, you just need a 1.2kW regular old 120V exterior outlet used for trimming the bushes. Even a cheap RV hookup would be overkill. If a federal government agency in the most powerful national on the planet can't take the most obvious step toward electrification in a case which is the best possible situation for an electric vehicle (very stop and go traffic, slow speeds, short routes, long total miles on odometer over life of vehicle), what hope does the rest of the world have in taking action on climate? Greta Thunberg is right. People don't care about climate. Literally everything else is a priority.
- kube-system 6y ago
  Yes, there are probably very few outlets where mail trucks currently park. These things are parked in the middle of parking lots, not in garages. And you need more than one outlet, you need one for every truck that parks there. And I am sure no current USPS office has power service hooked up for several hundred amps of draw that was never anticipated to be used. There's no way to do a project this big without phasing it in. The USPS has many tens of thousands of buildings.
  - Robotbeat 6y ago
    These vehicles ARE being phased in slowly. And installing 100-200 Amps of commercial service is cheap, and I actually think would largely be unnecessary as they can be set to charge at night when office demand is super low.
    - kube-system 6y ago
      Does the electric code permit overallocation in that case? That's not my area of expertise but I doubt it does. And yes, installing service is "cheap" but it takes time.
      - Robotbeat 6y ago
        It takes way less time than building these vehicles will and can be done cheaply with local electricians. It’s strange how common magical thinking about EVs is, like electricity is this newfangled thing that we don’t understand and need massively new, poorly understood infrastructure. We don’t. And that’s a huge advantage.
        kube-system 6y ago
        I am not saying and have not said electricity is the hard part. The logistics of steering the world's highest volume postal operation (with financial issues as it stands) is the hard part. The USPS handles 43% of the world's mail. There are no projects of this size that aren't phased in, which is apparently what they are doing. Some of these vehicles will be electric, so it stands to reason that they will also be building out the equipment and processes required to roll them out.
ratsforhorses 6y ago
Just putting this out there.."Adapting a lamp post into a charging point for electric vehicles can cost as little as £2,000" Seems like a good infrastructure project ...
- Robotbeat 6y ago
  2000 pounds? Try $200 maybe. And these vehicles cost on the order of $40k. Penny wise and pound foolish to spend thousands of dollars on a combustion engine and drivetrain just because you're afraid of a $200 exterior outlet.
  - lesdeuxmagots 6y ago
    $200 won’t even cover the cost of the electrician’s labor. And beyond just the cost of materials and labor to actually do the thing, consider the cost of the consultation on what is actually possible for a given location, the time and cost of permitting, the time involved in all the paperwork such as the drafting and filing of the plans, etc. This isn’t and informal process like some exterior facing outlet you decide to add to your home as a weekend project after looking up a YouTube video and doing a Home Depot run. Then there’s all the aggregate costs associated with switching. Maintenance of an EV requires different skills and different tooling. Establishing new or amending existing maintenance contracts, training new mechanics or retraining old ones, rewriting guidelines, purchasing new tools and equipment, etc. Many hundreds of thousands of dollars of costs per region. And you’re going to do that across far-flung areas of the US, many which have a current EV install base near or at zero? They have to work to transition this across tens of thousands of locations, while not jeopardizing the delivery of hundreds of millions of pieces of mail a day. And you’re going to suggest that they NOT take a slow phased approach? To transition one of the largest fleets of vehicles in the world? Please. Consider for a moment you may be wrong. That things are not as simple as you think. That when every single person is trying to explain why, you shouldn’t automatically attempt to find ways to dismiss or invalidate what they have to say.

m463 6y ago

from the other linked article: > While some will be EVs, some of the NGDVs will come with modern, fuel-efficient internal combustion engines. As electric vehicle infrastructure improves, these NGDVs will be able to be retrofitted with the battery-electric powertrain later on.

Robotbeat 6y ago
That doesn't make any sense. All the "electrical infrastructure" needed to drive the typical 45 mile route is a regular old 120V exterior outlet. The retrofit cost is going to probably be double the marginal cost it would've been to just make it electric in the first place. Whoever is making these decisions either wasn't given competitive bids or they're poorly informed about electric vehicles.
- shkkmo 6y ago
  I suspect there is a high level of variance in both the length of different routes and the availability of power in parking areas for mail trucks.
  - Robotbeat 6y ago
    Grumman LLVs only have a 120 mile range. This is already double. And sure, maybe you’ll want an RV style outlet (also pretty cheap) in case of 5% of vehicles where 120V wouldn’t be enough.
    - TylerE 6y ago
      The LLV can refuel in 5 minutes at over 160,000 public locations.
      - Dylan16807 6y ago
        It sure can! That's also much much more flexibility than it needs. For a low-mileage fleet vehicle it's deep into diminishing returns.

fshbbdssbbgdd 6y ago

It seems like you are comparing a theoretical modern EV to the terrible efficiency of the old LLV. They didn’t choose to continue buying the old LLV, they are buying a vehicle with a new ICE. So the comparison makes little sense.

gibolt 6y ago
Repair and maintenance are probably far more expensive than the gas costs, especially as a government contract. Gas prices will also increase as demand falls of a cliff over the coming decade. Electric wins on all fronts in cost, simplicity, and city health
- fingerlocks 6y ago
  I doubt maintenance & repair costs be more expensive for an ICE engine. The actual engine part requires little maintenance: occasional oil changes each year, spark plugs every five years, and maybe a belt in 10 years? I guess brake pads might be more common, but those are still a once every few years thing and inexpensive. All other common repair items would the same for an EV: suspension, various ball and CV joints, tires, AC, body damage, sensors, bushings, etc
  - elygre 6y ago
    I sometimes try to find an article I’m sure I read here at hacker news. It said something to the effect that the top ten wearables on a ICE car, measured by revenue in the auto shop market, don’t even exist on an electrical vehicle.
    - fingerlocks 6y ago
      Well that’s hard to believe, unless you pedantically itemize every tiny little thing. For example, a single oil change typically requires a new oil filter, a new crush washer on the drain plug, oil, possible additives, and sometimes an air filter swap. So that’s five items right there, but we’re still talking only 20 minutes of work and $50 of maintenance.

IncRnd 6y ago

> They drive about 18 miles a day on average The LLVs don't drive for an hour a day and sit in the parking lot turned off for 23 hours a day. Many routes might be 6 hours or more. You need vehicles that have AC or heat and the ability to run for an entire day. The differential cost for such a vehicle is not the cost of a battery. I'm not saying the current purchasing process is waste-free, but you need to use realistic numbers. The longest route is about 185 miles in Phillipsburg, KS. There are averages, medians, and modes, none of which are the right numbers. The average isn't as important as probable mileage. For example, say a bus carries a maximum of 80 people. When 10 people get on your bus, your costs aren't 12%.

Johnny555 6y ago
Carriers on many rural routes use their own vehicles. My parent's carrier drives a Subaru Outback
- IncRnd 6y ago
  I hadn't even contemplated that. Thank you. That's an important use case.

elihu 6y ago

Even a 75kWh battery would be expensive and heavy, and probably overkill in this case. If 100 miles of range is more than enough for most routes for the day, then something like 30kWh might be more reasonable. Also one might be able to keep costs down by optimizing for cost rather than energy density. LiFeP04 cells have been comparatively expensive, but it seems price has been dropping lately. It's also a good choice for safety and durability reasons, and because they don't use cobalt which is sort of expensive and sort of rare. Not using cobalt means avoiding a resource that would bottleneck other manufacturers of EVs. It'd be interesting to know what the actual specs are on the EV version of the USPS vans (battery type, capacity, etc...) and see if my speculation corresponds to what they chose. I don't know if they've released that publicly yet. A 30kWh battery could easily be 5 or 10 thousand dollars, which may well be worth it to save on gas for a long time; on the other hand, gas engines are well-understood and really cheap, because we have a huge established industry that builds engines by the millions and has been optimizing for cost for over a hundred years. This sounds a lot like the "Captain Samuel Vimes 'Boots' theory of socioeconomic unfairness" from Terry Pratchett that generally eventually gets quoted in this sorts of discussion. https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/72745-the-reason-that-the-rich-were-so-rich-vimes-reasoned https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/72745-the-reason-that-the-r...

jfoutz 6y ago
I think it’s more about timing. Rfp in 2015, the ev landscape was different, and not super clear battery technology would be where it is now.
- solarkraft 6y ago
  To some people it was. I have wondered then and I wonder now how it wasn't clear.
  - buran77 6y ago
    Between all the people looking at a problem you'll probably get every possible solution and one (or more) of them could be correct. Hindsight reinforces that opinion and makes it look more certain than it was at the time. But would you have bet the farm for your assumption then? It's easy to "see the future" when you have no risks to consider.

cycomanic 6y ago

That's essentially what the German Post did. They developed their own all electric van the streetscooter. Unfortunately they could not turn it into a viable business and sell enough units to others, so they shuttered the operation last year. Quite unfortunate, because I believe the project was well ahead of its time.

moooo99 6y ago
iirc German Post didn't really develop the Streetscoter [1] themselves, instead they acquired the company that did. It was a start up lead by a professor from university Aachen and from what I can remember, they had quite a lot of problems besides the ones you mentioned. There were a lot of recalls and other problems, especially towards the end of the company [2] The post employees also often complained about the relatively high loading edge for the storage box, which makes it super hard to load and unload heavy packages. Regardless of the problems, I think it was a really good idea and a rather cool looking vehicle. And when it comes to urban streets in Germany, the street scooter probably was the perfect vehicle when it comes to space requirements. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/StreetScooter https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/StreetScooter [2] (German) https://www.businessinsider.de/gruenderszene/allgemein/streetscooter-probleme-im-winter/ https://www.businessinsider.de/gruenderszene/allgemein/stree... [3] (German) https://www.elektroauto-news.net/elektroautos/streetscooter-groessere-problemen-als-bisher-geahnt https://www.elektroauto-news.net/elektroautos/streetscooter-...
- froh 6y ago
  and they developed it it "by themselves" i.e. by a company they acquired for that purpose, because neither the volkswagen group, nor mercedes/daimler were able or willing to just shipmelectric local delivery mini vans. last year deutsche post lost two streetscooter CEOs for "diverging opinions on the future of streetscooter". deutsche post is now trying to sell their subsidiary.
kwhitefoot 6y ago
Th Norwegian Post Office uses electric vehicles. I saw one in the street in Drammen this morning. See https://elbil.no/posten-elbil/ https://elbil.no/posten-elbil/

Adrig 6y ago

ITT people arguing that a country with $7 trillion of spending budget can't install a few power outlets in its post offices.

AlgorithmicTime 6y ago
The USPS isn't funded from tax dollars, it's funded by delivery fees.
jerry1979 6y ago
I don't think that spending really goes to the post office tho.
Mauricebranagh 6y ago
cough the unjoin'd up and fragile nature of the US Grid might also be a problem.
INTPenis 6y ago
The US is massive and its grid of infrastructure can't always keep up. But you're right that cities should have electrical USPS vehicles. Dominoes here have electrical bikes in city locations, why can't the post office have electrical cars?
AnIdiotOnTheNet 6y ago
Congress, specifically Republicans in congress, hate the post office and would like nothing better than to see the whole institution burned to the ground and replaced with private business.

totalZero 6y ago

It seems to me that a parcel-laden EV that starts and stops repeatedly will still be pretty lossy -- ie, the effective fuel efficiency will be quite low compared to typical EV city driving because regen doesn't work quite so well for precise stops. You're still going to engage the brake pads for a full stop in front of every mailbox. Also, maintenance would probably be more expensive if you have to train people to work on the electric powertrain. But presumably they could always modify the powertrain in a future iteration.

solarkraft 6y ago
And somebody think about the extra load on the power grid! It's not that these aren't valid concerns, they have to be addressed, they're just so minute they don't change the calculation even slightly. EVs at that speed may lose a bit more (already more efficiently generated and used) power in regen - vs. a guaranteed 100% loss on a gas vehicle.
- totalZero 6y ago
  We already know there's a guaranteed loss on ICE braking. If that were the only difference between ICE and EV then I would totally agree with you...BUT Cost/benefit analysis comparing ICE and EV changes wildly if the effective range of the vehicle is lower and the comparable fuel efficiency is not enough to justify the additional costs of EV. These are fleet vehicles that get deployed all across the country, and they have to be serviced, moved, etc...I doubt the choice not to go EV was an oversight, considering that fleet has been one of the beachhead markets for alternative-energy vehicles.

BCM43 6y ago

Aaron Gordon at Vice gives some explanations - most important cost-related bit seems to be they weight upfront cost a lot more than amortized cost, and non-electric does better on that front. https://www.vice.com/en/article/3an4k8/dont-expect-the-usps-fleet-to-go-electric https://www.vice.com/en/article/3an4k8/dont-expect-the-usps-...

blaser-waffle 6y ago
Everyone hates OpEx, even Feddy'Gov.
a9h74j 6y ago
Weight-per-wheel also figures into wear inflicted on local roads.

ffdhghggg 6y ago

People on HN are technical, so we're discussing technical reasons. However, that's not really how the government works. USPS leadership had instructions to electrify the fleet. For whatever reason, they decided they didn't want to. Maybe they didn't want to deal with a risky change, maybe they thought it would hinder meeting their other obligations. Doesn't matter. They decided they didn't want to do it. Their next step is then to write requirements in their rfp such that they can select a contractor that cannot meet the electric mandate. This allows them to legally pass the buck for the electric thing to their contractor, who will get paid big dollars to "develop" electric vehicles that their customer doesn't want. Congress gets to brag about their environmental contributions, USPS gets the vehicles they want, and the contractor gets a sizable sum to do nothing. Win-win-win.

Mauricebranagh 6y ago
I suspect they where afraid of push back from the previous administration as well. I am surprised they didn't look at using LNG instead of petrol.

johnwalkr 6y ago

It’s too bad, a massive fleet built to spec, with central fueling and maintenance locations is a perfect use case for electric now even though we are potentially a long way from charging stations as convenient as gas stations.

rtkwe 6y ago

They would also need to provide infrastructure for charging the fleet, possibly multiple times a day depending on what the routes look like, which is a significant cost if they want to do more than one battery worth of a route in a day, even if they did have short enough routes that they could do overnight charging for everything that's still a lot of power draw and would need expensive electrical upgrades. Sticking with gas there's no further infrastructure investment required.