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USPS Forges Ahead with Gas-Powered Mail Trucks Despite EPA's Desire for EVs
- warning26 5y agoSo weird, considering that mail delivery seems perfectly suited for EVs; the charging can be consolidated where trucks are parked overnight anyway.
- aleksandrm 5y agoSomeone is probably pocketing from the deal. Always follow the money.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- Spivak 5y agoI mean even if they went with EVs you could still say that. Who isn't financially motivated by obscenely wasteful government contracts? $11.3 billion / 150 thousand trucks = $73k / truck
- voldemort1968 5y agoPeople think this kind of logic is an example of thinking, but it's actually thought suppression.
- humanistbot 5y ago> 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.
- TAForObvReasons 5y ago"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.
- guynamedloren 5y agoWhat?
- BoysenberryPi 5y agoExplain 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?
- ceejayoz 5y agoIt’s a silly comment because any deal would involve someone making a profit.
- BoysenberryPi 5y agoYes, 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.
- pksebben 5y agoisn't that what the contractor with the trucks is doing? otherwise why are they providing vehicles at all?
- haswell 5y agoWould 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.
- oh_sigh 5y agoIf 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.
- haswell 5y agoI 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.
- Uehreka 5y agoPart 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.
- 5y ago
- Spooky23 5y agoMy dad was a rural mail carrier. It’s stop go stop go. I don’t think it would be a great EV use case at all. USPS is pretty smart/efficient with this stuff.
- mft_ 5y agoLow speed urban stop-go driving is where EVs excel versus ICE, I think?
- Spooky23 5y agoIt’s pretty extreme. Brake pads every 7-10k miles. I would think that it would be pretty draining. Perhaps not!
- mft_ 5y agoAgain, with regenerative braking, something else that EVs are also better at :)
- omnomynous 5y agoRegen 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.
- seiferteric 5y agoplus all the starting and stopping, you would think would benefit from regenerative breaking.
- akira2501 5y agoThe 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.
- Ekaros 5y agoProbably 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.
- babypuncher 5y agoThey are adopting a mix, looking to inject 5,000 EVs into their fleet by sometime next year.
- ghostly_s 5y agoMost rural delivery is handled by contractors who use their own vehicles, I believe.
- boardwaalk 5y agore: 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.
- stetrain 5y agoThe 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.
- 5y ago
- SllX 5y agoNot 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.
- TheHypnotist 5y agoMy area's utility has the funding to place them all over the state. This would have been a good opportunity to cooperate and pilot the system here.
- SllX 5y agoFair, 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?
- toomuchtodo 5y agoWhichever offsets the most fossil fuel usage.
- TheHypnotist 5y agoBoth because the program is so large it could accomplish this. Truthfully, the feds should fund this.
- colechristensen 5y agoThere 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.
- KennyBlanken 5y agoIt does not have to be an all-or-nothing affair. 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.
- zacharycohn 5y agoSo 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.
- lettergram 5y agoYou 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.
- toomuchtodo 5y agohttps://electrek.co/2016/02/25/mail-man-tesla-model-s/ https://electrek.co/2016/02/25/mail-man-tesla-model-s/ https://www.tesla.com/en_CA/customer-stories/electric-mail 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!
- gambiting 5y ago>>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
- labster 5y agoMy 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.
- antisthenes 5y agoYour 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.
- chrisbrandow 5y ago
- twothamendment 5y agoI 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...
- ars 5y agoThey are - I read they are doing 10% EV's, with flexibility to increase that if it works well. It seems to me the ones asking for EV are not the ones paying for it, which seems to be the problem.
- stetrain 5y agoSadly I found no such option to pay for it on any of my ballots recently.
- Mountain_Skies 5y agoIIRC, 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.
- ars 5y agoSeems to be a money thing - anyone know how much gas vs electric costs for postal vehicles? This https://about.usps.com/newsroom/national-releases/2021/0223-multi-billion-dollar-modernization-of-postal-delivery-vehicle-fleet.htm https://about.usps.com/newsroom/national-releases/2021/0223-... gives no details.
- h2odragon 5y agoI 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.
- kevinventullo 5y agoI 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.
- newsclues 5y agoEV or not, why is it so fuel inefficient?
- arcticbull 5y agoConstant stopping and starting. This is where most car energy is expended. Cars are most fuel efficient when they're rolling about 50MPH.
- l33t2328 5y agoI’ve heard this many times, but I’ve never actually seen it cited.
- MrRadar 5y agoIt'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.
- wnevets 5y agoIts shameful that Dejoy is still allowed to ruin the USPS.
- humanistbot 5y agoNote 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.
- detaro 5y agoGiven 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?
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- ghostly_s 5y agoGive 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.
- Jtsummers 5y 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".
- Natsu 5y agoShouldn't they secure that funding before they require this?
- Jtsummers 5y ago> 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.
- CameronNemo 5y agoWASHINGTON, 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. https://www.reuters.com/world/us/us-house-approves-50-billion-relief-bill-postal-service-2022-02-08/ https://www.reuters.com/world/us/us-house-approves-50-billio... Sen. Rick Scott, R-Fla., blocked an initial vote Monday [Feb 14] on the Postal Service bill, saying it needed to be reworked. https://apnews.com/article/business-postal-service-marsha-blackburn-4e0788280a7d1bd23ffd888d8d624068 https://apnews.com/article/business-postal-service-marsha-bl... Go ahead and keep blaming this administration for problems created by Bush that Republicans in the Senate refuse to remedy.
- anm89 5y agoGod forbid I wouldn't get junkmail littered through my mail slot one day.
- theedman 5y agoI 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.
- DeRock 5y ago> no range related issues that come with a BEV The average USPS route covered by these vehicles per day is 20 miles (and median is probably even lower). Range isn't a concern for the vast majority.
- _0w8t 5y agoI 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.
- post_break 5y agoThey 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.
- thedougd 5y agoIf 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
- stetrain 5y agoWell EVs have to have a noise maker below 15mph so you can't sneak up on old ladies in parking lots. I propose "We just got a letter, We just got a letter..." Or if true chaos is your goal, ice cream truck music.
- Overtonwindow 5y agoThe 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.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]