Electric USPS Vehicles Targeted (Again) By MAGA Insanity

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In the phantasmagoria world of MAGA, anything that is not powered by good old fashioned gasoline, diesel, methane, or coal is an affront to decent, right thinking Americans. For what seems like a decade already, those guardians of all that is holy have been resisting any move to replace the delivery vehicles commonly used by USPS with efficient electric alternatives.

The last time the USPS modernized its fleet of vehicles was 1987, when it selected the Long Life Vehicle from Grumman. Those vehicles were designed to have a useful service life of 24 years. Those 24 years were up in 2011. Many of them are now almost 40 years old and surviving only because of the skills and ingenuity of the mechanics who keep them running. “Our mechanics are miracle workers,” Mark Dimondstein, president of the American Postal Workers Union, told AP News. “The parts are not available. They fabricate them. They do the best they can.”

There is another consideration here. Those vehicles have an average fuel economy of 9 miles per gallon, due largely to the nature of how they are used — lots of stops and starts on routes that are seldom more than 30 miles long. Does that sound like a perfect use case for electric vehicles? Oh, you betcha. But the fury of the MAGA lunatics is not constrained by rational thought.

No EVs For USPS!

Senator Joni Enrst of Iowa has been running her mouth lately to decry the decision to purchase battery-electric vehicles manufactured by Oshkosh Defense to move the USPS fleet forward into the 21st century. She said “it didn’t make sense for the Postal Service to invest so heavily in an all-electric force.” In fact, she will lead the charge in Congress to rescind what is left of the $3 billion from the Inflation Reduction Act allocated to help cover the $10 billion cost of new postal vehicles.

Ernst has called the EV initiative a “boondoggle” and “a textbook example of waste,” citing delays, high costs, and concerns over cold weather performance. “You always evaluate the programs, see if they are working. But the rate at which the company that’s providing those vehicles is able to produce them, they are so far behind schedule, they will never be able to fulfill that contract.” Representative Michael Cloud, of Texas, who is co-sponsoring the effort in Congress to roll back the EV portion of the USPS modernization effort, has said the EV order should be canceled because the project “has delivered nothing but delays, defective trucks, and skyrocketing costs.”

Production Hell

Like everything that comes out of the mouths of MAGAlomaniacs, Ernst’s and Cloud’s words are 100% Grade A horse-puckey. USPS spokesperson Kim Frum told AP the production delays for the Next Generation Delivery Vehicles (NGDVs) was “very modest” and not unexpected. “The production quantity ramp-up was planned for and intended to be very gradual in the early months to allow time for potential modest production or supplier issues to be successfully resolved.” Readers will recognize this process as being typical when it comes to ramping up production of a new vehicle, a period described succinctly by Elon Musk as “production hell.”

There is another component to this debate — exhaust emissions. A study by the University of Michigan in 2022 found the new electric postal vehicles could cut total greenhouse gas emissions by up to 20 million tons over their predicted, cumulative 20-year lifetime. Professor Gregory A. Keoleian, co-director of the university’s Center for Sustainable Systems, said the push toward electric vehicles is critical and needs to accelerate, given the intensifying impacts of climate change. “We’re already falling short of goals for reducing emissions. We’ve been making progress, but the actions being taken or proposed will really reverse decarbonization progress that has been made to date.”

Back To The Future

The USPS announced in 2022 it would deploy at least 66,000 electric vehicles by 2028, including commercially available models. That decision came after years of deliberation and critiques that it was moving too slowly to reduce emissions. By 2024, the agency was awarded a Presidential Sustainability Award for its efforts to electrify the largest fleet in the federal government.

In 2021, Oshkosh Defense was awarded a contract for up to 65,000 battery-electric and internal combustion engine Next Generation vehicles over 10 years. The first of the new trucks, which feature hoods that resembling a duck’s bill, went into service in Georgia last year. The design provides for greater package capacity, meaning fewer trips back to local post offices to pick up more mail. But there is more to it than that. The NGDV trucks are equipped with airbags, blind spot monitoring and collision avoidance sensors, 360-degree cameras, and anti-lock brakes — all things that were virtually unheard of in 1987. They also have one other feature their Grumman based predecessors lack — air conditioning.

To date, USPS has ordered 51,500 NGDVs, 35,000 of them battery-electric. So far, it has received 300 battery vehicles and 1,000 gasoline-powered units. Former Postmaster General Louis DeJoy said in 2022 the agency expected to purchase mostly zero emissions delivery vehicles by 2026. It will always need some internal combustion engine vehicles to service routes that are longer than normal.

Smart Is As Smart Does

Kim Frum said NGDV purchases were “carefully considered from a business perspective” and are being deployed to routes and facilities where they will save money. The Postal Service has also ordered 9,250 Ford E-Transit delivery vans and has received about 8,200 of them so far, according to Frum.

Ernst said it’s fine for the Postal Service to use EVs already purchased. “But you know what? We need to be smart about the way we are providing services through the federal government. And that was not a smart move.” It is unclear what about the purchase of electric delivery vehicles by the Postal Service Ernst thinks is not smart, but the MAGAsphere loves those toxic exhaust emissions that spew forth from the tailpipes of combustion engine vehicles because that means the oil business is thriving, and that’s a good thing.

Maxwell Woody, the lead author of the University of Michigan study, made the opposite case. He told AP that postal delivery vehicles have low average speeds and a high number of stops and starts — which allows them to take advantage of regenerative braking. Routes average under 30 miles and are known in advance, making planning easier. “It’s the perfect application for an electric vehicle and it’s a particularly inefficient application for an internal combustion engine vehicles.”

Once again, the drivel issuing from the banks of the Potomac is uninformed, ill advised, and illogical — all things that acolytes of the MAGA religion revel in. During World War II, when gasoline was scarce, some figured out a way to mount coal burning devices to the fenders of their cars and use the resulting coal gas as fuel. Don’t tell that to Joni Ernst. She might try to make coal gas the default fuel for all USPS vehicles, which she would probably think of as a “smart move.” Stupidity runs rampant near the headwaters of the Potomac.