Enlarge / It's called the Next Generation Delivery Vehicle, and it was designed by Oshkosh Defense. (credit: USPS)
On Tuesday, the long-running saga of the United States Postal Service's delivery fleet took another turn when Postmaster General Loius DeJoy announced that it is increasing the number of electric vehicles it plans to purchase. The new plan calls for a minimum of 60,000 Next Generation Delivery Vehicles (NGDV) by 2028, 45,000 of which will be battery EVs. The USPS will also buy an additional 21,000 commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) EVs—perhaps EVs like the Ford e-Transit or the BrightDrop Zevo 600—for deliveries by 2028. And from 2026, all vehicles bought by the USPS will be BEVs.
"Every neighborhood, every household in America deserves to have electric USPS trucks delivering clean air with their mail, and today’s announcement takes us almost all the way there. The Postal Service’s shift to only purchasing electric mail trucks within five years is the marker of a sea change in the federal fleet as the country looks to an electric future. Ultimately, this shift will buffer us from volatile gas prices, spur the growth of clean energy jobs, and have us all breathing easier," said Adrian Martinez, senior attorney on Earthjustice’s Right to Zero campaign.
The Postal Service's plans to replace its fleet of aging, inefficient, and increasingly dangerous Grumman LLVs crystalized in February 2021, when it announced that it had selected Oshkosh Defense's NGDV as its next mail delivery van. At the time, the USPS said it planned to buy between 50,000-165,000 NGDVs, but that only 10 percent of the order would be BEVs.
Read 8 remaining paragraphs | Comments