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Comment by ceejayoz | Hacker News Reader

First paragraph of the article:

> The service awarded contracts on Tuesday for 9,250 battery electric vehicles and for more than 14,000 charging stations.

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Reading farther in the article:

  It also remains unclear where the vehicles and charging
  stations will be placed, as those details have yet to
  be finalized, the agency said.

So, to answer the GP's question, "Where are they going to charge them once a post office has a few?" Nobody knows.

They're provisioning more chargers than vehicles. The answer seems fairly clear. For now, if you get three EVs at your local post office, I'd expect roughly three chargers installed.

Would you mind quoting the source for that? The article says something else.

You want a source for "I'd expect"? MLA style?

Me. 1 Mar. 2023. Hacker News, comment #34991363.

No, for the part where you made an assertion of fact. "I'd expect" is your opinion, and you're entitled to that of course. I was asking you to quote where you got the source for "provisioning more chargers than vechicles."

> They're provisioning more chargers than vehicles.

It's literally the first paragraph in the article. Scroll up, I quoted it in my original comment too.

> The U.S. Postal Service's plans for a nationwide fleet of electric vehicles are getting closer to being realized. The service awarded contracts on Tuesday for 9,250 battery electric vehicles and for more than 14,000 charging stations.

If you read more of the article, you will see additional numbers.

  As such, a contract has also been awarded for the agency to acquire 9,250
  commercial-off-the-shelf internal combustion engine vehicles "to fill the
  urgent need for vehicles." In December, the agency said that 21,000 COTS
  vehicles will be purchased and are "expected to be battery electric,"
  but said that depends "on market availability and operational feasibility."

"They plan to buy more EVs" can (again, I expect) probably be safely read to include "and the requisite infrastructure to accompany them" eventually.

The question was , "Where are they going to charge them once a post office has a few?" So, I'm not sure why you are trying to correct my factual quotes to answer that question by posting your expectations as to the future hypothetical existence of chargers.

This argument is pointless

Logically, most of the chargers will be at post offices to accommodate the fleet. Completely negating the question asked.

Outside of the post offices, where will USPS set up additional chargers? That is the unknown right now, if they actually do set up any outside of post offices.

There is significant doubt they would set up chargers outside of post offices, considering they acquired 14k charging stations and have 30k+ offices in service.

Perhaps, like with most complex problems, there isn’t a “one size fits all” solution. I’m all for skepticism but this criticism is just lazy.

It's incredibly lazy to say my criticism was "just lazy" since I didn't post criticism but answered a question about the contents of the article.

No, you made an irrelevant and dismissive remark under the “guise” of an answer. Lazy.

No, the existence and locations of these chargers is not set. They may not even get purchased. The current planned rollout is for 75 locations. The absolute truth to "where these will get placed" is nobody yet knows. Nobody knows where, because nobody knows where the vehicles will get placed.

Many post offices have parking lots where the vehicles park overnight currently. Mail carriers don't take these vehicles home, they typically park on USPS property overnight. I suspect this is the top candidate location for many of these chargers.

https://thumbs.dreamstime.com/b/usps-mail-delivery-trucks-lo...

Statements like that don't really answer the question. Other reporting on this has said that 75 locations are currently getting build-outs for charging stations. [1] The actual question is where these will be built. Answering "the parking lot" isn't actually helpful to "where".

[1] https://thehill.com/policy/energy-environment/3879040-usps-t...

Er, what? "The parking lot" is a perfectly good and reasonable answer to that question.

Their post history suggests they are pedantic just to be pedantic.

Yes, they are not being built yet. Where else do you think they would go?

You are making too many assumptions about the arrival of chargers and BEV in the first place.

When looking where the chargers will go, the issue is that the cars aren't necessarily going to be purchased and delivered, either. So, it isn't clear where the chargers will go, if anywhere. Today, there is a small rollout of chargers planned, but that isn't enough to say that many post offices will have chargers.

For those reasons, "the parking lot" isn't a feasible answer compared to specifying which post offices or other information. And, the USPS has said they don't know where the chargers will go, possibly a location centralized between several post offices. After all the question was asked by that poster, so it's best to presume that actual information was desired not flippant answers like are in this thread.

Many post offices have full lots today, so purchasing more vehicles and retiring some will surely mean there will be even less room for chargers in the parking lot.

You are correct, we do not have an official answer directly from USPS. The article says they still need to review which routes will work best with BEVs.

However, it is highly likely that, for the local offices and route which they find to be suitable they will build chargers in the lots, because 1) others in this space have already done this and it works, and 2) the place where the vehicles are currently parked is the place where it makes the most sense to park the vehicles, logistically.

https://www.rivianownersforum.com/attachments/amazon-chargin...

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