Another fresh proposal from the USPS would increase the proportion of electric cars it intends to buy in order to update its fleet. The service stated that “at least 50%” of its initial purchase for 50,000 next-generation mail trucks will be battery electric vehicles in a press release on Wednesday. That represents a significant shift from the February announcement by USPS leadership that only 10% of the new fleet will be electric.
That figure did increase in March, just a few weeks after the service informed President Biden that it would continue with its intentions to buy largely gas-powered vehicles, when it revealed that it was planning an initial order that would include 10,019 electric trucks.
The projected fleet of the USPS has been thoroughly examined in terms of its environmental impact. In an effort to stop the service’s intentions to convert the majority of the fleet to gas engines, 16 states joined forces with environmental groups in April to file a lawsuit against it. There was uproar earlier this year when the Environmental Protection Agency revealed that the new Oshkosh cars would only achieve 8.6 miles per gallon with the air conditioning on.
In order to expand its fleet, the USPS has announced that it plans to purchase an extra 34,500 “commercial off-the-shelf” vehicles during the next two years. It wants as many of them that are “commercially available” to be battery-powered, according to its press statement. However, a notice does state that up to 14,500 of those vehicles will be fueled by gas. The USPS predicts that about 40% of the 84,500 total off-the-shelf and purpose-built mail trucks will be electric.
There is a lot of pressure on the USPS to update its delivery vans. The Grumman Long Life Vehicle, the fleet’s current workhorse, is highly out of date; it gets poor gas mileage, costs a lot to repair now that it’s decades old, and lacks essential features like air bags or air conditioning (imagine driving one in Dallas, Texas, where the feels-like temperature reached 114 degrees Fahrenheit today). Oh, and it will eventually catch fire.
Even while the USPS’s plans are getting better with each new development, it is still unclear where they will go from here. Around 115,000 more next-generation trucks could be purchased by the service from Oshkosh. In a statement to the media on Wednesday, it stated that it would assess the environmental impact of any future purchases but made no firm statements regarding the percentage of electric vehicles it would or would not purchase.
