Lots of surprises in a few sentences. I'm glad to hear that some are intended to be EVs. I wonder what the final percentage will be, or if this is just a bullet point to check off.
Lots of surprises in a few sentences. I'm glad to hear that some are intended to be EVs. I wonder what the final percentage will be, or if this is just a bullet point to check off.
Since they are planning to be capable of retrofitting them, I wouldnt be surprised if they are planning on holding out a bit to see if battery and charging tech improves or standardizes further before investing heavily.
All of that said, I would be very surprised if they didn't electrify the entire fleet before 2030. The cost savings in maintenance alone would probably justify it even without environmental consideration.
Sure, it's good for the planet, but what spaceship sounding craft will I have the pleasure of hearing every afternoon as it blasts full throttle every 30 yards between suburban mailboxes?
Or, am I missing something?
Basically it's a fat juicy government contract where a military contractor gets fat juicy pay check to build something that already exists that other delivery companies world wide are buying because they are very suitable for this kind of work load (lots of stop/start, predictable routes).
The other interesting thing in the article is the rather large range of vehicles (50000-165,000) that is being committed to. Half a billion for 50K vehicles seems a lot of money to commit to in a company that probably is wondering how much of their core business is still going to be there in a decade. Delivering letters is basically a dying business. The only mail I get is the very occasional company that somehow hasn't figured out email. Is that still going to be a thing decades in the future?
Anyway, if that's more than even 1% of the market, I'd be very surprised. It certainly does not justify spending half a billion on inventing a vehicle with an option to have ICE capability (and the inherent design compromises that come with that) just as this market is being eaten up by basically most manufacturers launching specially designed EV only transport solutions.
A simple solution for this problem would be to simply keep on driving ICE vans on these longer routes until technology catches up. No need to sink money into R&D for this. It's completely redundant.
Replacing battery packs is just not a thing with EVs. Certainly not every year. There are enough first generation EVs still on their first battery pack to prove this. Besides, most vendors provide pretty nice warranties on their batteries because they know that they will rarely have to do any battery replacements. This is not a wait and we'll see kind of thing; companies buying these vehicles in large volumes tend to do their homework when it comes to cost.
All of this is not really something that needs researching, study, etc. US Post is technically kind of late to this. Besides, there are loads of electrical delivery vans in service across most delivery companies. Most of those are pretty much all switching as fast as they can to get some nice cost savings. The business case is long past needing a more evidence or proof. As a consequence, electrical vans are selling as fast as they can be built.
So, you would need to get an EV with a range of more than 400 miles.