The Post Office has placed an order for replacements for the aging LLV (long life vehicles). The contract was to Oshkosh Defense, a unit of Oshkosh Corp. Under the contract it will build between 50,000 and 165,000 vehicles over a period of 10 years. It will initially get $482 million to initiate engineering efforts to finalize the production vehicle design, and for tooling and factory build-out activities that are necessary prior to vehicle production. I am not sure why this order specifies that 90% of these vehicles will be gas when the majority of the rural routes are well within the range of the electric version. These vehicles are expected to last 30 years and it is likely that the majority of vehicles will be electric in 30 years. From Post Office specs: The shortest rural mail route in the United States is 1.9 miles in Henderson, Nevada, serving 695 centralized boxes. The average rural mail route is 45 miles long and serves 493 mailboxes. More than 20,000 rural routes nationwide now have postal vehicles assigned to them. Ford just released this pricing on it's 2022 e-transit vans. It seems to me that the Post Office could order the right hand drive version of these pretty quickly where appropriate. Maybe it is a problem of building out charging stations? Longevity of Fords? Low Roof/Regular wheelbase: $47,185 — 126 miles of range Low Roof/Long wheelbase: $48,395 — 126 miles of range Medium Roof/Regular wheelbase: $48,280 — 116 miles of range Medium Roof/Long wheelbase: $49,490 — 116 miles of range High Roof/Long wheelbase: $51,530 — 108 miles of range High Roof/Extended wheelbase: $52,690 — 108 miles of range
Lots to go over here. 1. The RH version is illegal in the US and Ford will not pay to Americanize it or it’s drivetrain 2. Simple, the post office is forcing their requirements to make a cheap standard vehicle into a custom non-standard vehicle. Commercial EVS such as the ones used by Amazon and City Buses have an average life of 3 years, let that sink in for a moment 3. Oshkosh is partnered with a 3rd party EV partner and has a modular design so vehicles can be easily drivetrain swapped plug in play at any time between gas and EVs 4. Similar to the EV police cruzers that were never used EVs do not work well for the post office due to reasonably priced charging, many areas use the same truck on many routes during the day and night depending on local demand, the amount of time the truck is parked at the depot is minimal in these cases even if the vehicle has short routes it does not sit still long, add to this Sunday deliveries and the non improved external lots and you can guess the rest.
There was a thread on this site with a great discussion of the unique demands of a mail delivery vehicle. Many, many starts and stops per hour. Many miles on badly paved roads. Long life requirements. More abuse in a month than a normal car experiences in a lifetime.
Being the spouse of a former rural carrier and the former owner of both a 1975 RHD mail jeep and a 1995 RHD Jeep Cherokee, you nailed it. Long Life Vehicle means 'no frills' to minimize down time.
USPS certainly has their problems, but I do like being able to send a Medium flat rate box, with a handful of HV battery modules in it, to Hawaii for <$14. Funny, how I've never really had a problem with long distance packages, but the last one I sent to Pennsylvania ended up on a 3 week, 2 thousand mile tour of America. It travelled more in those weeks than my whole family did in the last 15 months, lol. And for only $14!!
I have a theory about that, and maybe you can confirm it's validity or dismiss it as a pipe dream. I too had a flat rate priority package that traveled from the east coast to the west coast with a 2 week vacation around North Carolina after a few days in Chicago. My Theory: Every distribution center is set up to forward any mail that makes it to their loading dock, but some are badly over loaded this year. Is it plausible that the Chicago center was overrun with no outgoing flights to San Francisco in the foreseeable future, so they added the excess packages to the next underloaded outgoing truck or plane? After all, once it got to the Carolinas the center there would automatically tag it for the next westbound plane, right? At the same time, Chicago can take it off their list of delayed packages. It's the only thing that makes sense to me.
1. Right hand drive is not illegal. The current Postal LLV is a right hand drive vehicle that has been on U.S. roads for 30 years. Ford, Honda and many other manufacturers already make most of it's vehicles in right or left hand drive since they export to countries like the UK, Australia and all the former British colonies etc where that is the standard. 2. The Post Office put out specs and RFQ for a custom vehicle specifically designed for postal delivery. This is the same process as for the LLV that Grumman built. The LLV spec stated a life of 24 years and most of them are more than 30 years old now. 3. No drivetrain swap is easy and it seems pretty wasteful. Why spend money for a gasoline engine, transmission, gas tank, cooling system, exhaust system with catalyst which would be replaced with an electric motor, battery pack and inverter? Why not build the electric infrastructure (charging stations) now as the electric versions of these are introduced and be done with it? 4. My wife retired from the Post Office and delivered mail with one of the 20 LLV's at her office. The routes are 15 to 20 miles with about 600 stops. She said that the vehicles are generally assigned to one mail carrier for his/her one route. There are a few exceptions. The ones at her office leave between 8 and 9 am and return around 4 to 5 pm. The Post Office goal is to get them off the street in less than 8 hours. That leaves them with more than 12 hours per day to charge. They would be good candidates for the electric version of this vehicle as would many small town Post Offices.
The post office has been buying RHD vans made for Europe as an intern solution to the aging fleet. So they could get the Transit if desired. There are several negative comments about those vans from postal workers. An 'off the shelf' commercial van is designed to be loaded and unloaded from outside, with many having a divider separating the cab and cargo areas, not deliver mail and packages from the driver's window. The differences between a commercial van and custom postal vehicle may not look like much, but the ergonomics of the former make it a pain to work with every day for the postal job. The size of this contract means the cost for a custom vehicle isn't going to be much different from a commercial one. There are over 200k LLVs to be replaced. The ratio of ICE to EV can easily shift before this contract is finished. The replacement process started in 2015.
Your mis reading what I posted 1. Fords RHD version of said vehicle is Euro spec and cannot meet any US requirement for Federalization, structural, engine, dash, emissions and crash all fail and are illegal for import, PERIOD Can the government get exemptions, sure but normally it’s under extreme circumstances. The post office is none too keen on the single 5MT Diesel drivetrain that is the only offering for the vehicle in Euro spec either Meaning a new vehicle is needed 2. It’s not that simple, USPS is making changes in the 13th hour to the agreed design that already met spec. It’s been back and forth like this for what? 8 years? 3. as stated 100% of custom electric vehicles for Amazon and city buses have only had a useful life of 3 years, until the HD EV market catches up to the light duty market it’s not only unreasonable but impossible to expect more than a small percentage to be electrified until long term fielding is successful. The price the Post Office dictates is also too low to get a Cadillac EV drivetrain. The post office is continuously doing drivetrain swaps currently and expects the process simplified so it’s easy from a maintenance and technology improvement standpoint.
Yes. Not sure if it is still a current thing, but for a while there were federal laws saying that certain classes of mail could only spend n nights in a given depot before making progress in their respective journeys.... so next truck to anywhere got popular.
Hey even if the postal routes are short, they still take all day to run for the most part. ...and that's important because they're supposedly air conditioned. 50 mile range may not sound like much but running the A/C (or heat) for 8 hours on top of that changes things a bit.
Leadfoot mentioned heating and cooling requirements of the vehicle. It could be considerable since the drivers side window will be down all day for the typical mounted city delivery while making about 600 stops in 15 or 20 miles over 8 hours. They could go the heat pump route that the Prius uses to minimize the energy consumption but it would still be significant.
Just to clarify, the current mail trucks have heaters but not air conditioners. I understand air conditioning for operator comfort has been a specific goal for the replacement vehicle for a long time. So from the specs, the new vehicle has to use more energy overall than the outgoing model.
Not just comfort, but safety. A few carriers have died of heat stroke while working in the old trucks. Safety is also part of the reason for the door arrangement for the new trucks. Accessing the cargo space from the rear meant some workers were there when the truck was rear ended.
