USPS Starts Nationwide Electric Vehicle Fleet - Slashdot

Posted by BeauHD

• • • 1 hidden comment

    • • Re:

        Will you switch to new FUD when there are no "melted power lines", or will you just keep using this nonsense?

        You probably need to find a way to wedge "woke" in there if you want people to take your analysis of power grid stability seriously.

      • Re:

        Perhaps your Google is different from mine, but mine says 25 miles per day right at the top of the page.

        A quarter of a MW is nothing. That's like, one industrial motor.

        An obvious solution is to stagger the overnight charging schedule. This can be set up in minutes.

      • Re:

        The answer was in the excerpt from my top result. Maybe you should stop clicking on total bullshit, so Google will show you useful stuff instead of the crap you've apparently been searching for.

    • Re:

      The range for the cargo van version of the E-transit is only 126 miles. I'm not sure what the average mail carrier vehicle range is per day, but if it's somewhat close to the fresh battery range, that could pose problems a year or two down the line after a number of charge cycles.

      Note that, though a postal delivery driver may go hundreds of miles in a day, he doesn't go half that way out and the other half back, but covers an area (possibly large) near the post office. So he doesn't have to do it all on on

  • Yeah, and... something, something, charging stations... blah, blah, batteries... range... thingumy, thingumy, supply chains... whine, whine... rare earth metals... because reasons... it'll never work for anyone because it doesn't work for my commutes between Boston & L.A., etc., etc...
    
    What on earth was this team of experts on vehicle procurement & running a national delivery service thinking?! They should've asked me I could've told them [insert fossil fuels sponsored talking point here]!!!

    • Re:

      Change is scary for conservatives and the elderly.

      • Re:

        Change is scary for all of us. The real issue is that we Trust and Distrust different groups of people and sources.

        My Grandmother who would be over a hundred if she were still alive. Would trust what ever was in print, which included the national enquirer, or the magazines on the grocery store shelves. My parents in the 1980's were flabbergasted on how she can believe such nonsense, that was obviously fake.... Now had visited my parents they were giving me, an middle age adult, lectures on how dangerous

      • Re:

        "Change is scary for conservatives and the elderly.". What's scary for this elderly geezer is that change (of the life-affirming and anti-capitalist kind) is happening far too slowly.

    • Re:

      Look, we all know the post office motto: “Neither rain, nor snow, nor sleet, nor hail, nor thermonuclear warfare shall keep the postmen from their appointed rounds.” And it’s pretty obvious electric vehicles will get bricked at the slightest EMP. That’s why all post office vehicles should be built like a 40’s diesel just as god intended.

      • Re:

        Steam engines are more flexible & reliable. You can pretty much burn anything in one of those.
        • 1 hidden comment

    • Re:

      If they are smart they will have a plan to recycle those batteries on day too. A decent supply of standardized batteries is a valuable thing.

    • Re:

      If you can find a way to wedge the free market in there, I think you'll have Slashdot bingo in this one post.

  • Re: Limited range

    Didnt the USPS just sign a deal for their new letter carrier vehicles? There was a big stink on it on/. That they were not electric. What makes sense would be to use a chevy volt approach. The first 100mi is electric and then a generator powers the motor as a supplement. That will greatly reduce emissions while ensuring the vehicle doesnt get stranded where infrastructure is poor. Though since its the government it makes sense to kill 2 birds by making all post office branches be charging stations for the

  • Re:

    This is an ideal fit for the majority of delivery routes, including the frequent stops. A few rural star routes will require ICE for long range.

    • Re:

      > This is an ideal fit for the majority of delivery routes, including the frequent stops.

      In warm climates, yes.

      Sleet, or snow, or dark of night - perhaps not.

      • Re:

        Are you claiming EVs don't work in the snow or in the dark?

        • Re:

          Cold weather does limit range but cars have started using heat pumps to keep the battery from freezing. People act like once the first snowflake falls their EV won’t make it around the block. If cold weather really is that much of a problem then you better let all those northern states and nordic countries too for that matter.

          • Re:

            I foresee EVs getting insulated batteries in the future, with more powerful cooling systems to carry away the heat that's currently radiated by the casing. All the good ones have battery cooling systems already. Since batteries produce heat during normal operation anyway, just keeping it from escaping will keep them warm while operating. A heat pump or just a simple resistive heater can be utilized while plugged in, similar to a block heater on a diesel.

    • Re:

      My grandparents once worked STAR routes.

      For those not in the know, rural star routes are not typically serviced by postal employees driving postal vehicles. The routes are contracted out. By lowest bid even. My grandparents had their own vehicle for delivering mail.

      Some people, for speed or just plain "old" would use two people - one driving, one grabbing the mail. My grandparents often did this when close to retirement age. The distances between houses is typically high, so you'd be getting the mail r

  • Re: Limited range

    The average postal route requires 24 miles of driving and nearly all of them are less than 70 miles.

    • Re:

      And it's nearly all stop-and-go driving. Good for regenerative braking, but bad for internal combustion engines that burn fuel sitting still.

  • Old timey whining

    Old timey whining - the crap that passes for "insightful" on/. these days.... Who mods that up? Oh, wait.

    • Re:

      Next they’re going to lament the good old days of lead plumbing and films made of nitrate stock. Boy those cars without safety glass and breakaway steering columns sure were great to drive!

  • Re:

    I actually asked my mail carrier. The routes out of this rural post office run between 20 and 75 miles. There are other post offices with 150 mile routes, so those will be keeping the gas vehicles for awhile.

    The bigger concern is range in the winter through snow with tire chains. That is typically only a couple weeks a year though.

  • Re:

    Most apparently go under 50 miles per day... at very low speeds. Curious about the heat and air conditioning needs though; that could be up to 4 miles of range per hour. Still a huge win over the current vehicles, but over its life cycle it is likely the lower bound of viable range.

  • Re:

    Post offices are on average spread out 10 miles apart from each other, which means they will often cover 314 square miles Across 3 or 4 vehicles per post office.
    Plus postal delivery is a lot of slow driving and start and stop which actually is good for range, as these EPA ranges are based on 60mph highway driving.

    The Oil and Gas companies, Their political allies, and people who are allied with them. Are looking for reasons why EV are bad, as the Battery Electric Vehicle is a major disrupting technology, whi

    • Re:

      Nitpick: If they are 10 miles apart, the radius is 5 miles, and the area is pi*25, not pi *100.

  • Re:

    The longest delivery route in the entire country is.......Longest Rural Delivery Route [usps.com]

    Clarinda, IA, 181.4 miles daily.

    But that is unusual, this news article reports.......USPS Could Serve Nearly All Its Mail Routes in Electric Vehicles [postaltimes.com]

    The average postal route requires 24 miles of driving and nearly all of them are less than 70 miles.

    That E-Transit provides 5x the range for the average route, and almost 2x the range of the "nearly all" figure. The article suggests 99% of the routes fit within electric

  • Re: Limited range

    That is more than enough range. Do the math on an 8 hour day. Yields about 16 miles for each hour. Watch a mal truck for a little while and you will see that it is stopped or at idle for far more than 50% of its driving time. They are not flying down the freeway, but instead making their way around town stopping while the carrier delivers the post. Another question is whether the range is based on the EPA test that involves faster driving as opposed to the start stop driving this vehicle will see.
    I su

• • Re:

    The range of these vehicles is about five times the length of the average USPS mail route, and if one breaks down they can go and pick it up with a regular old dino juice burning tow truck. Your FUD is sad and tired.

    • Re:

      I think you missed an important part of the rebuttal - Specifically, that these are the final delivery vehicles for mail. They have a home post office that they deliver mail from and to, and they spend every night at that post office. They're only using like 1/4 of their range for the daily route, so there's plenty of time to charge the vehicle back up at night.

      Why would they need to use any public charging infrastructure? The clear thing to do for the USPS would be to install chargers in their parking

  • Well - the summary does say the USPS's plan is to have 75% of their fleet purchases be BEV... it's almost as if they already did the research and figured out that while BEV will work for most of their routes, some will still have to use ICE.
    • 1 hidden comment

  • Re:

    I live in a state where the charging infrastructure makes it impossible for Tesla's Mobile Service "rangers" to visit customers in some areas and be able to make it back to a viable charging point, either due to the distance or conditions.
    
    So Tesla uses a standard gas-powered Ford Transit to do housecalls here.
    
    Tesla arguably has the best EV charging infrastructure in the US. If it's not good enough for Tesla, you know the USPS is going to have to wait a while before they can ever do an EV fleet.

    Tesla

    • There's a rural/urban divide. Remember, most people still live in major metropolitan areas. I'm guessing these vehicles will be used on shorter routes. The 100+ mile rural mail route will likely still be gas. The 30 mile city route is a great candidate for electric - delivery mail each day, charge at night, and save on fuel and maintenance costs.

      The majority of routes are only 20 miles [govexec.com]. Even 30 miles is unusual in urban areas. As well, most rural routes are either on flat ground, or go mostly up hill on the way out. What having a vehicle with 120 miles of range means in this context is having enough power to operate in very cold conditions, and/or for multiple days without charging in an outage.

      The longest routes and those in the coldest locations will still be on gasoline for the foreseeable future, but even there you can plan to move the vehicles to a gaseous fuel* like LPG or CNG surprisingly cheaply in order to improve emissions.

      * Yes, they are stored as liquid, but they are fed into the combustion chamber as a gas... except now they're doing direct liquid injection of these fuels in some engines... whatever

      • Re:

        In fact electric vehicles have been used for this kind of thing in the UK for decades. Milk floats delivery fresh milk to your door every day. They used lead-acid batteries to keep the noise down in the early hours of the morning.

        They were limited by the technology of a century ago, but performed a similar function to these postal vans. Relatively short routes with deliveries close together. Often no door or seatbelt. Low speeds.

        The main reason they are rare now is that people buy milk at the supermarket in

  • Re:

    Tesla uses Transits not because of range, but because they don't have a viable vehicle of their own to deploy. They also use lease-return Model Xs, and IIRC 3's and a few Y's. Functionally, the Transit is much easier to deal with than a car or light SUV, even after removing unnecessary seats and putting in custom shelving systems.

• ›

  • Re:

    An edge case where ICE vehicles won't work? Ugh why are we using them at all for anyone else then??? Anything should service 100% of the people 100% of the time, or it's worthless!
    • 1 hidden comment
• Considering that the current 'fleet' of vehicles delivering USPS out in my area consist of a couple of early 2000s voyager minivans converted to right-hand drive, I'm guessing I'll see these EVs approximately never.
  • 1 hidden comment

• The USPS delivery fleet has been long overdue for an upgrade, my local letter carrier is riding around in a vehicle that's over 20 years old and from what I can tell is badly maintained. Still, there are 45 of these in the fleet at the local post office and I'm wondering how they'll get enough Kwh in terms of supply and charging stations to handle that many overnight. Right now the letter carrier just drives to the onsite gas pump and then goes and does the route, so the logistical changes along with workplace scheduling will be something fun to watch. Why? Unions usually have great clauses in their CBAs about changes to workplace practices and the Postal Workers Union will probably want a significant study into how this impacts their members before signing off on anything.

  • Re:

    I love how you manage to bitch about both electric vehicles and unions in the same post. As others have pointed out the average mail vehicle drives 20 miles a day and these new models have a range of 120. Why do all the naysayers think every vehicle will be charged from flat to 100% nightly? Do you burn a full tank of gas every day?

    • Re:

      I live on a rural delivery route. It's over 15 miles to the nearest town with a PO for me. I was not bitching about unions but CBAs usually are very specific about work rules and procedures; if you change what the workers day to day responsibilities and procedures are, they can come back and ask for adjustments. It's standard practice.

      If you've ever been involved in trying to get technology into workplaces you'd understand. When PTT networks (NEXTEL) came out there was a big push to get off of Motor

      • Re:

        Using some rough calculations- if the fleet of 45 vehicles was swapped to electric- going by another post that said the average mileage of USPS routes is 24 miles per day. Lots of stop and go, but not a lot of high speed, so make a generous rough estimate of 500Wh/mile. 540KWh per night. Assume 12 hours, and the charging is spread evenly over those 12 hours- 45KW - 187A. Close to the edge for a household circuit, which in the US is most often 200A service. With the assumption that a post office is likely in

  • Re:

    This is a couple days work for an electrician I imagine. I don't have the stats on thee trucks requirements but let's even say each one needs 20A@208V, so 900A total so they will likely need 2 3-phase 600A installs with sub panels, receptacles, etc. (I am not en electrician so if we have one here who would like to school my napkin math, have at it)

    Now this is definitely work but it's not all that uncommon for commerical buildings and it's replacing the gas infrastructure as well which also requires mainte

  • Re:

    So you think the unions will insist that their members continue handling toxic, flammable substances?

    • Re:

      probably not but knowing work rules under CBAs, they'll probably want full training, cost, and schedule adjustments if their members are required to charge the vehicles.

• Weâ(TM)ll looks everyone did rush out to buy doing the supply shock. I am sure tax payers got an amazing deal.
• Then they will wish they had a nice warm internal combustion engine to snuggle up to, and batteries dont do so good in cold conditions

  • Re:

    Yeah everyone driving a Tesla or Bolt goes without heat every winter. Some days there isn’t enough battery power to make it out of the garage!

  • Re:

    Heat pump, heated seat, and a heated steering wheel. Heat pump can also condition the batteries in both winter and summer! This is a solved problem.

    • Re:

      Heat pump can also condition the batteries in both winter and summer!

      Modern electric auto batteries are hysterically efficient, but horsepower requires a similarly hysterical amount of electricity. (A thousand watts is only 1 1/3 HP.) So once they're up to temperature keeping them warm is not an issue even in the coldest climates, and there are a number of hacks to heat them after an overnight "cold soak", such as using the motor controllers (which also brings the motors to a better operating temperature)

  • Re:

    I know. I've been trying to tell Tesla drivers in Finland this for years but they just won't listen to me!

• None of this will improve the usps.

  My mail will still go two doors down, and I'll get their mail.

  My mail carrier will still insist into ramming an obviously too-large package into a standard mailbox, pulling back and forth with such vigor that she unseated the concrete base. Now I have to re-pour the base. Thanks, lazy fat slob of a mail carrier diversity hire. This is what happens when you go by quota and not merit.

  And while this electrification is great for high-density urban and city, let's see how it

  • Re:

    The USPS service is shitty? Well you pay people too little to give a fuck and this is the result. Same deal with fast food service being terrible the past few years. $15 an hour still isn’t enough to deal with Karens and other shitty people day in and day out.

  • Re:

    So your local service sucks, and you do nothing about it? Oh I see your argument deteriorated into political, climate, AND corporate corruption rambles. How about we stay off your lawn and you stay off ours, ok?

    • Re: None of this will help improve

      My local post office looks, smells and works like some third world shithole.

      Nothing I as a person can do about it other than smash the Frowny button on the "how did we do today" kiosk thingy on the way out.

      And the "why" this is so is ENTIRELY political. Hiring practices. Training practices. All political and hugely so.

  • Re:

    I have to say, "lazy slob" and "with such vigor" that she managed to break your box doesn't really go together.

    The article says 75% of the fleet. How much do you want to bet that they've already decided to hold off there?

    It isn't virtue signaling, it's cost saving. They can get and operate custom electric vehicle for less overall money than they can gasoline ones. The electrics promise lower fuel costs, lower maintenance costs*, etc...

    *Keep in mind that stop and go driving is perfectly fine for EVs, but

• NO matter the outcome, the effort will produce valuable insights.

  I am real curious what the commercial usage on the batteries will do. I suspect it will be fine based on Electric Bus efforts.

• Does anybody know how much additional electric power generation these will require ? How many post offices will need their grid connections increased to handle the load when all these vehicles plug in at the same time ? ( in the evening when the sun isn't shining on all those solar panels ) I suppose the mail just won't get delivered the next time California issues a 'do not charge your EV due to brown out conditions' warning. EVs are fine until a lot of people get one and then we have grid problems. It to

  • Re:

    OK, here goes: the US consumed 8.7e6 barrels/day in Oct 2022. Each barrel is 42 gallons, and a gallon of gas has the heat equivalent of 33.7kWh. 12e9 kWh usage per day. In the US, found an estimate that the annual total miles driven is 3.2e12, so the daily is about 8.8e9 miles. So, from that- the average energy usage (assuming all the miles were gasoline driven) - 1.4kWh per mile.

    The main reason we have EVs today is that they are massively more efficient typically in the range of 0.25kWh/mile - so the same

    • Re:

      Thanks for the reply. That's the information I was wondering/worried about. I was afraid that it would amount to a larger percentage than that.

  • Re:

    Actually depends how far they have to go.

    If each vehicles does 50 miles, at 2 miles per KwH (likely they will do a LOT better than this) - each vehicle requires recharge of 25 kWh over 12 hours. A standard outlet would cover most of that (even a US one at 120V),

    Many industrial/commercial properties (in the UK at least) have 3-phase electricity... so we are talking many vehicles drawing 3kW over the night... and if you have to use local renewables (sun doesn't shine at night) then... there's batteries...