Only 10 percent of the USPS’s new delivery vehicles will be election (Green Car Reports):
U.S. Postmaster General Louis DeJoy confirmed to lawmakers Wednesday that electric versions of the trucks will make up only 10% of the next-generation fleet and claimed that a fully electric contract would have cost up to $4 billion more for the whole contract.
They won’t even be delivered until 2023. Given the generally short routes, slow speeds, and guaranteed overnight idle time for recharging, how is it possible that electric can’t be more cost-effective than gasoline-powered?
See also “Oshkosh’s NGDV Mail Van Looks Incredibly Dorky for a Reason” (Automobile):
If electric isn’t the smart choice for USPS local delivery, how could it ever be the smart choice for a family that wants to take some evening/nighttime trips, some intercity trips, etc.?
Loosely related:
- a comment on a Tesla article: Every time I ask a Tesla owner to list the tech that makes some kind of difference they can’t come up with anything meaningful. What is it? Dog mode? Cheetah mode? Flush-mount door handles? A big tablet stuck to the dash looking like a high school shop project?
No surprise to me that the Sierra Club has attacked it and is probably going to succeed in canceling the contract, which might put Oshkosh Defense out of business. This has been a six-year process that was already slow-walked, to replace a poorly-designed-by-committee government truck with a slightly newer designed-by-committee government truck. The Automobile Mag. article says they had to cost “under $35,000 each.”
Does that include the R&D and the construction of the plant to build them? Was there any electric powertrain available 6 years ago that Oshkosh Defense could drop into the new mail truck for anywhere near the cost of a cheap gas engine? I’d be surprised if there was.
Also, I wonder if all the local post offices really want electrified trucks. Even small towns have a half dozen of these vehicles or more, so if they’re all electric, every post office in the country would be plugging large numbers of electric vehicles in to the (very) local power grids, including in places where the grid is crappy and unreliable. I really don’t think the grid itself is reliable enough to support an all-electric fleet of mail trucks, and unless the Biden Administration wants to spend more on infrastructure like putting solar cells on the roof of every post office….wait, wait for it!
So it looks to me like the postal workers of America will be soldiering on in their clapped-out, worn-out government gas-burners for several more years while the entire process is upended and restarted, with the right people getting the contracts this time. Elections have consequences.
Semi-related: About a month ago, Prof. John Kelly of Weber Auto came though on his promise to do a series of deep dives into a Tesla Model S (Performance). He posted the first video about a month ago and you can see all three of them on his channel. Here’s Video #1: “Understanding the Tesla Model S Performance Motor.”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MQV3D8F6gvw
This is a 532 horsepower (Ludicrous mode) induction motor with a rotor that weighs about 60 pounds and rides on special silicon-nitride bearings that are fed by a dedicated lubrication system to keep them alive at the motor’s top speed of more than 17,000 RPM at 155 MPH.
Those bearings and the very heavy-duty final drive geartrain are really what makes it possible for Tesla to extract so much power and speed from the Model S. Kelly’s other two videos cover the power electronics and the front moto(s), in John Kelly’s inimitable style. Everyone’s wise, patient, funny old gearhead uncle who has forgotten more about cars than most people will ever know but still loves what he’s doing.
By the way, Kelly got the motor for Video #1 out of a burned vehicle! He doesn’t say what caused the fire, but he complains that he spent way too much time cleaning it up.
The most interesting thing to me is the stator housing construction! It looks like a big part of the housing was welded *by hand* – at least on this year Tesla. The donor vehicle was a 2016 Model S, P90-D.
Despite Tesla’s reputation for automated and robot construction, check out all the hand welds: https://youtu.be/MQV3D8F6gvw?t=1852
It looks like an old Maytag dishwasher or something, but 99.999% of Tesla owners will never see that part.
Alex: electricity demand is lower at night, which is when these vehicles could be programmed to charge. The high-demand period for the U.S. grid is mid-summer and there is an enormous difference from peak to trough. https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=42915
So… why isn’t postal delivery an ideal use case for electric?
@Philg: I would be in favor of it under with a few stipulations. I agree in principle that well-engineered electrified postal trucks could do the job. They don’t need a lot of horsepower and they don’t need a lot of range. I have three conditions/concerns:
1) They need to be extremely rugged and able to handle a lot of abuse and neglect as well handle the full range of US temperature extremes with an almost maintenance-free powertrain.
2) The price of electricity and situations like rolling blackouts in California must be considered.
3) The cost of maintaining the vehicles and their batteries over their anticipated lifespan has to be calculated accurately.
This means that the battery systems should at the very least be thermally controlled at least as well as the ones in the Chevrolet Bolt/Volt, which uses liquid cooling AND heating to maintain the batteries in the optimal temperature range. If you try to “cheap out” and neglect the thermal management, the battery life will suffer.
And they have to be “stone axe” reliable. There’s some reason to believe that can happen. My 2010 Ford Escape Hybrid is basically the same car that was used in New York City as a taxicab vehicle. Some of those cars went more than 300,000 miles on the well-engineered Ford/Aisin HD-10 and HD-20 transaxles. As long as the powertrain can be engineered with a real lifespan of, say, 10 years and 300,000 or 400,000 miles before overhauls, I’ll vote for it.
Don’t you burn out the battery pack in 7-8 years or so? At that time, it might b recycling time anyway.
@Tom B:
You don’t really “burn it out.” The battery lifespan is affected by a lot of things, including the construction and battery type (e.g., NiMh vs Li-Ion), and how well the battery electronics take care of maintaining it and all its cells through the temperature ranges it experiences, maintaining adequate state of charge, and so forth. For example, on my FEH, the computers in the vehicle automatically activate the air conditioning system and the internal battery cooling fans whenever the battery box gets above 85 degrees F. Temperatures over 131 degrees F are destructive to the cells. Trying to pull / push very high currents through extremely cold batteries are also ungood.
You can make these packs live for 10 years or more. The one in my FEH is 11 years old and it’s still working. But the car was very well cared for. Each design is different and has different characteristics.
Here’s a very good comparison on the battery thermal management of the 2017 Chevy Bolt/Volt when compared to the 2018 Nissan Leaf. The Bolt/Volt has a very good system for managing the thermals, not so much the Leaf. Postal trucks take a lot of abuse. Every day, they have lots of stuff basically thown in them, and then they’re driven around, stopping hundreds of times per day, in almost every weather, everywhere in the U.S. If they want to go with electrified trucks, they’re going to need a very reliable and rugged, super-low maintenance powertrain. And that’s going to cost some money – probably quite a bit more initially than an equivalent, cheap gas engine setup (these trucks only need about 70 horsepower and get to 60 MPH in about 35 seconds according to the specs.)
https://youtu.be/WlxBOJrEKAo?t=94
I think more than anything else, this is the reason it hasn’t been done yet. I’ll be the all-electric powertrain, custom designed and built for this application, will cost at least $10,000 per truck.
The thing I hear consistently from friends that have test driven a Tesla is that it is fun to drive and has lots of acceleration. That and the novelty seem to be the only selling points.
The post office wasn’t very functional in the best of times. Gas prices where there are jobs are back to $5, so electric vehicles for anyone rich enough to own a power meter are no brainers. The amount they overpay for those trucks must be far greater than the amount saved by not burning dinosaurs. The post office must pay $1 trillion for every government contracted truck.
You mean gas prices where are no jobs, only telecommute are back to $5? Gas prices where there are jobs and telecommute are yet around $3 although up 25%. With deliveries in 2023 they plan strategically that post – 2024 gas prices are going down again.
I’d absolutely be for cutting back to twice a week service. Others may have different needs, but there is very little the post office delivers that I cannot wait a couple of days for delivery. I feel like this would help to make them solvent.
Twice a week mail service would be absolutely devastating for anyone doing targeted direct mail. It’s bad enough that the USPS has had to cut back hours and facilities at their bulk mail centers and close many of them. You may not rely on direct mail for your livelihood, but many thousands of other people in the country do. The best way to save the US Postal Service is to renegotiate the “benefits for life” contracts so that they are not dragged into the abyss by their unfunded obligations.
@G C: Also, twice a week mail delivery would actually mean hiring more workers and more staff for the two days they were delivering the mail. Things would pile up. It would mean even slower and more unreliable mail service, not the other way around. The current six-day-per-week service could probably be cut to five days and the time could be reapportioned so that delivery through the rest of the week would *improve*. I would support that, and it would be a meaningful savings, as long as the bulk mail centers and sectional center facilities that currently accept mail on Saturdays are allowed to remain open.
In my opinion, the only way I see electric cars becoming acceptable is when you can replace the battery, automatically, within 5 min. almost anywhere, anytime.
Here is the basic idea. You pull into a battery station near you, and drive over some marked lanes or wheel clamps like in a carwash. While seated in your car, you swap your credit and the machine will kick in by pulling out our existing depleted batter and replacing it with a new fully charged one. Then you are on your way.
Your depleted batter then gets charged and used for the next vehicle that needs a charged batter.
Having this capability at gas stations will ease the anxiety of running out of power or having to always be forced to charge your car at home overnight or at work in the parking lot. It also means electric “gas” station can be fitted with the required wringing, supply lines and equipment to do the so called quick charge if need be.
You might say the batter is owned by the car company that you bough your car from and there are issues with warranty and all. Yes, those have to be worked out, but this is *one* project that the government can act on to put the right policies and funding in place to make it happen.
As an example, years ago, we used to hold on to our *own* propane gas tank for BBQ cookout. We use to take the empty tank to a station, wait for it to be filled up and then come back with it. We use to *own* our tank. Not anymore. Now days, you take your drop your empty tank and grab a full one. In and out in 1 min. Electric cars battery should be the same.
George: Nio is doing this already in China. See https://www.caranddriver.com/news/a33670482/nio-swappable-batteries-lease/ (you can have a small battery for city driving and swap in a big one for a long trip). They’ve now done 2 million swaps (since roughly 2014): https://thedriven.io/2021/03/26/nio-has-now-done-two-million-electric-car-battery-swaps/
An Israeli company tried this years early and the only result was wasting $500 million in inventors money. https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2013/mar/05/better-place-wrong-electric-car-startup
Tesla did the hot swap batteries too. Many problems, including switching out the most expensive part of the car, with a part which may be inferior to your original.
https://www.teslarati.com/tesla-to-debut-battery-swapping-stations/
Fast charging is the way to go. George, do you own an electric car?
@George A: Not unless the energy density of the batteries increases tremendously and all the safety concerns are taken care of. Have you ever seen the size of the battery packs we’re talking about? They’re very big. You’re not going to swap them in and out in 5 minutes. And they are high voltage batteries – 300 volts as a minimum, with elaborate computer-controlled isolation systems to prevent them from frying the vehicles in a collision that causes a short. We are nowhere near the point of hot-swappable batteries on EV cars like you can with your Black & Decker drill.
Go here. This is the battery pack on a 2017 Volt/Bolt.
https://youtu.be/ssU2mjiNi_Q?t=390
This is not something you swap out and plug in under 5 minutes, and it won’t be for a long, long time.
@Phil, thanks for pointing out that we already have this swapping capability, and how they failed.
@James G, today, I am driving a 2011 HHR (bought it 5 years ago after when my used Impala died on me, at around 215K on the odometer). I am not an EV believer, I also don’t agree with any large cars such as large SUVs or trucks (unless the truck is for work). I also don’t agree in paying $40k, $30k or even $15k for a car. I buy used, drive it till it falls apart or the repair is no longer worth it. All that I want in a car is that it gets me from point-A to point-B on a 25-30 mpg (and it must have a radio and cruise control).
@Alex, yes I know the batteries are large on those all EV cars (they are the whole bottom part of the car). And you are right, till when the size decreases but yet keep the same charge capacity or more, swapping out batteries is not an option. But I don’t see how EV becoming an acceptable option till when easy-swap becomes possible. Having to wait 30 min (for those so called fast chargers) is not acceptable option. And expecting to have a charger at home and at work is also not a realistic option. So for now, we are left with either solving the easy-and-fast-swap option or supper-supper-fast charging. If either of those options can happen in less then 5 min. — as if you are filling your car with gas today — then EV would become an option.
The main reason battery-electric vehicles cannot win the USPS contract is the long list of requirements. Why can’t USPS just use the same electric truck that GM is building for FedEx, the BrightDrop EV600? Ford, Hyundai and other manufactures are also releasing electric delivery trucks for the expanding courier market.
https://globalnews.ca/news/7571087/gm-electric-delivery-vehicle-business/
USPS and Canada Post are obsolete and should be shutdown, with email and other electronic transfers and lots of private courier options available there is just too much competition to make the USPS and Canada Post economically viable.
Lest anyone think this is all “easy-peasy” or cheap, even in 2021, here’s some news I read today:
Ford has had to stop selling its $799 home charging box for the 2021 Mustang Mach-E because of unspecified problems that it’s trying to resolve. It’s a 48-amp Level II charging box and apparently they couldn’t get it 100% right out of the gate. This is a great big automaker and its flagship product:
https://www.autonews.com/sales/ford-halts-sales-its-home-ev-chargers
“The convenience of home charging is a highly touted selling point for shoppers considering a new EV that can cost nearly $60,000. The Ford-branded, 48-amp home charger can add 28 miles of range per hour, a spokesman said, meaning that most owners can fully recharge by plugging in overnight.”
So that’s $800 just so you can *charge* the Mach-E at home overnight. If anyone knows what the system in the vehicle costs per car, please let me know. I’ll bet it’s well north of $10,000.
What’s a “USPS”? Is that the pension fund liability that got wiped out by email and Amazon?
There are two things I like about my Tesla, compared to the slightly-more-comfortable-but-no-faster BMW 328i that was my other main possibility.
1. Instant engine response. This is true whether it’s from a standing start, or poking along at 80mph on I-95.
2. It’s cheaper to operate, though it was more expensive to acquire. BG&E (An Exelon Company) has discount rates for overnight charging that make it about three and a half cents a mile. (Gas is ~2.50/gallon, you might get 25mpg from a Beemer, so call it ten cents a mile.) Even the highway robbery rates for superchargers are under nine cents a mile. There are no oil changes (really the only routine maintenance left on ICE cars) and I suspect the motor, which is simpler, will need less tending than an ICE.
Those are the substantive differences. I like Autopilot, particularly in traffic jams. I don’t know that it’s terribly different from other driver-assist systems. I like poking my phone to pre-heat or pre-cool the cabin. I leave my coat in the back of my car in winter, because I almost never wear it. That feature is electric-specific in the sense that I can warm up with the garage door closed, which would be problematic for an ICE. I like almost never stopping for “gas”. When not traveling, I’m always around 65-85% of my full range. When traveling, I stop for half an hour every 180 miles or so to get coffee and move around a little. In the time it takes to drain old coffee and get new coffee, I’m back to 80% power. (Well, the car is, at my age it’s a losing battle for me.)
One thing I really *dis*like is that nobody but Tesla will work on the car. I can’t get new tires, or get a flat fixed, because the local tire places say their insurance won’t let them lift something with a battery. (They don’t do Leafs for the same reason. I made a joke about electric cars needing to be grounded. He didn’t get it.)
@tc> “I can’t get new tires, or get a flat fixed, because the local tire places say their insurance won’t let them lift something with a battery. (They don’t do Leafs for the same reason. I made a joke about electric cars needing to be grounded. He didn’t get it.)”
Heh. I have a very strong suspicion that “insurance” excuse is 100% bogus. First of all, I belong to a form for Ford Escape Hybrids, and I have *never* heard anyone mention not being able to get their tires changed because the car has a battery. The battery in the FEH is not as big or powerful as a Tesla, but it’s still plenty big at several hundred pounds in a big slab. Also, the weekly digest “Tesletter” says:
“When in need of a tire change, and depending on where you are located, Costco, America’s Tire, Discount Tire, amongst others, can serve you. I used Tesla’s Mobile Service and was very pleased with the experience.”
I can’t vouch for their veracity, but I’ll bet they’re correct. You could also call at the Tire Rack (www.tirerack.com). I just used their website and not only would they sell me 4 tires for a 2018 Tesla Model S P100D with staggered front/rear tires, they chose 10 recommended installers based on my zip code to ship them to for discounted installation with the purchase!
I like the Tire Rack, and have bought tires from them for more than 15 years at various times.
I think your local shops don’t want to deal with Teslas and other electric vehicles because — they don’t like them. They know what you are talking about, in terms of other maintenance, and a lot of these shops run by local mechanics see it as the end of their world. Which it will be in a lot of cases, as the gas vehicles dry up and the mechanics are left with little or nothing to do for a living.
But Tire Rack’s phone number is 888-353-5082 and they have never lied to me, and they’ve also recommended some very good tires over the years. I just bought a set of Pirelli Scorpion Verde A/S Plus IIs from them at their recommendation, based on the reviews on their website, and they’re great tires.
I think you’ve run into some folks who don’t want your business either because they don’t like the owners or they don’t like the cars, or don’t know anything about them, or a little of all three.
Oh, sorry: Here’s the link to the “Tesletter” post: https://tesletter.com/tags/tesla-tire-change/
@TC> I’ve also had some “local” mechanics give me the evil eye just for driving in the shop with a Hybrid! I talked to one a few months back about how much he would charge me to change the fluid in my eCVT transaxle (which also cools and lubricates the electric motors). It’s a *very VERY* simple job. One drain plug, one fill plug, 6.5 quarts. You just have to have something to pump the fluid in there with.
Well.
I pulled up to one shop and asked the lead mechanics (at least that’s what he looked like). He said: “Oh, you don’t want to do that. You’ll destroy all the solenoids in that transmission on a Hybrid.” Then he gave me a whole raft of total garbage about how the rest of the car “works.”
He knew NOTHING about the car. The Ford/Aisin eCVT transaxle in a 2010 Ford Escape Hybrid has NO solenoids inside of it. It it has no clutch packs, and no shift forks, no synchronizers, or anything else like that, either. In fact it is *much simpler* than a modern multispeed automatic transmission. It’s two electric motors, a differential, and some gears to connect them.
There are two kinds of mechanics in the world right now: those who have accepted the fact that hybrids and increasingly electric vehicles are going to be the overwhelming majority of vehicles on the road – soon! – and those who have decided to fight them until they draw their last breath. I suspect you’re dealing with the former.
@tc> Finally, and I’m sorry to our host for the multiple posts. There is nothing in the 2018 Nissan Leaf manual I just read that mentions any special procedures necessary for this car in terms of its electrical system when changing the tires. There are some things to watch for regarding the TPMS (tire pressure monitoring system) and the special run-flat Michelins if your Leaf is so equipped, from the Warranty Information Booklet. But nothing pertaining to the electronics or the battery. I’d be very surprised if a Tesla was any different in this regard.
In fact, on every Hybrid and EV I’ve ever seen, one of the most sophisticated systems on the car is there to monitor the isolation of the high-voltage system from the rest of the vehicle. Even a few milliamps of leakage current from the HV system to the LV side can trigger the isolation fault circuits, which on a Tesla involves blowing a pyrotechnic device to FORCE the battery disconnect.
I think your local Dukes of Hazzard/Crazy Cooter mechanics are talkin’ out the wrong orifice, if ya get my drift. My $0.02.