this post was submitted on 12 Sep 2024
303 points (99.3% liked)

[Dormant] Electric Vehicles

3193 readers
1 users here now

We have moved to:

!electricvehicles@slrpnk.net

A community for the sharing of links, news, and discussion related to Electric Vehicles.

Rules

  1. No bigotry - including racism, sexism, ableism, casteism, speciesism, homophobia, transphobia, or xenophobia.
  2. Be respectful, especially when disagreeing. Everyone should feel welcome here.
  3. No self-promotion.
  4. No irrelevant content. All posts must be relevant and related to plug-in electric vehicles — BEVs or PHEVs.
  5. No trolling.
  6. Policy, not politics. Submissions and comments about effective policymaking are allowed and encouraged in the community, however conversations and submissions about parties, politicians, and those devolving into general tribalism will be removed.

founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
 

The Postal Service’s new delivery vehicles aren’t going to win a beauty contest. They’re tall and ungainly. The windshields are vast. Their hoods resemble a duck bill. Their bumpers are enormous.

“You can tell that (the designers) didn’t have appearance in mind,” postal worker Avis Stonum said.

Odd appearance aside, the first handful of Next Generation Delivery Vehicles that rolled onto postal routes in August in Athens are getting rave reviews from letter carriers accustomed to cantankerous older vehicles that lack modern safety features and are prone to breaking down — and even catching fire.

Within a few years of the initial rollout, the fleet will have expanded to 60,000, most of them electric models, serving as the Postal Service’s primary delivery truck from Maine to Hawaii.

Once fully deployed, they’ll represent one of the most visible signs of the agency’s 10-year, $40 billion transformation led by Postmaster General Louis DeJoy, who’s also renovating aging facilities, overhauling the processing and transportation network, and instituting other changes.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] Addv4@lemmy.world 25 points 2 months ago

He tried to get them to mainly use gas powered hybrid ones. Which sounds great on the surface, but they basically got the same mpg as the now at least 30 year old LLVs they were replacing, just with AC. When that fact was put out, these fully electric ones genuinely just made way more sense for most postal routes. They took a long time to develop, but that's because the usps had a long list of stuff they wanted to accommodate (sounds crazy, but they seem to have actually taken a lot of feedback from the drivers).

He also got rid of a lot of the automated letter sorting, most likely to slow mail-in voting. A lot of those sorter couldn't easily be replaced, as they were expensive machines.