Even a 75kWh battery would be expensive and heavy, and probably overkill in this case. If 100 miles of range is more than enough for most routes for the day, then something like 30kWh might be more reasonable.
Also one might be able to keep costs down by optimizing for cost rather than energy density. LiFeP04 cells have been comparatively expensive, but it seems price has been dropping lately. It's also a good choice for safety and durability reasons, and because they don't use cobalt which is sort of expensive and sort of rare. Not using cobalt means avoiding a resource that would bottleneck other manufacturers of EVs.
It'd be interesting to know what the actual specs are on the EV version of the USPS vans (battery type, capacity, etc...) and see if my speculation corresponds to what they chose. I don't know if they've released that publicly yet.
A 30kWh battery could easily be 5 or 10 thousand dollars, which may well be worth it to save on gas for a long time; on the other hand, gas engines are well-understood and really cheap, because we have a huge established industry that builds engines by the millions and has been optimizing for cost for over a hundred years.
This sounds a lot like the "Captain Samuel Vimes 'Boots' theory of socioeconomic unfairness" from Terry Pratchett that generally eventually gets quoted in this sorts of discussion.
The LLV's are not merely old, they're ancient. The EV marketplace still isn't particularly mature: there are competing charging networks, the charging standards are still evolving, and in the US, there are perhaps two mainstream manufacturers of pure BEVs (Tesla and Nissan).
If you're the sort of customer who keeps a vehicle 3 years and then upgrades, none of this is likely a worry for you. Any shakeup in the charging networks or incompatible changes to the standards will probably happen long after you sell the car.
The USPS, on the other hand is in this for the long haul. It seems reasonable to suppose that they'll have their own charging network, so problem solved, right? Wrong. They'll still need parts support every part of this operation for at least 35 years if they keep them as long as the LLVs.
Remember the lengths one dedicated person had to go to to resurrect the DE-19 connector[0]. You're looking at that problem multiplied by thousands of parts.
I've always coveted the original Honda Insight (the two seater), and one popped up for sale near me last year so I did some research. First party support is pretty well done. Third party support exists, but it's not a volume business, and it's priced accordingly. And that's a car that's only 15 years old.
The mail truck fleet will be bigger, but the price of parts will still be high if there are big shifts in the market and nobody's making anything similar. The market has matured and stabilized since Honda quit making the original Insight, but probably not enough to inexpensively support a vehicle for 3 decades.
Except this is a PERFECT application of battery electric drivetrain. I literally can’t think of a better one. If this isn’t “good enough,” then precisely what is? What WON’T be sunk by short-sighted risk averseness (actually nothing risky here) or plain indifference if this can’t be electric?
And now they’ll have forced themselves into expensive conversions if they ever want to go electric in the next 3 decades.
You're not wrong, but as somebody who buys cars used and hangs on to them for a while, I'm sitting out going electric for at least another 5 years in the hope that things shake out somewhat on the charging side.
That, and for all of the reasons the USPS is sitting this out. The TCO has some pretty big unknowns over a multi-decade timescale at this point. I do a lot of my own work on my cars, and long-term parts availability is a real struggle at times.
I think J1772 has basically won in the U.S. for AC charging. It's hard to imagine something replacing it at this point. The competitors are Tesla's charge port and the other DC charging standards. DC chargers though require a lot of power and are expensive, so it's not realistic to expect them to be ubiquitous. J1772 is not much more than a 110 or 220 outlet with a fancy plug and electronic handshake protocol, and can be installed just about anywhere that a regular 110 or 220 outlet is, assuming adequate power is available at the site.
(A typical house might have dozens of outlets, but no one expects to be able to run a space heater off of every single plug all at once. Someone installing dozens of chargers, on the other hand, probably intends to use them simultaneously.)
Between all the people looking at a problem you'll probably get every possible solution and one (or more) of them could be correct. Hindsight reinforces that opinion and makes it look more certain than it was at the time. But would you have bet the farm for your assumption then? It's easy to "see the future" when you have no risks to consider.
Also, I think that view only looks at the vehicle itself and neglects the onerous funding model the USPS is saddled with and the investment required on the supply chain/logistics side.
The fleet itself is a massive capital investment. But changing the fuel would be sizable as well. The USPS already has a supply chain network and facilities for gasoline. Replacing that will be huge in itself.
Municipalities are a better first-step and have had some success with moving bus fleets and maintenance vehicles to NG or EV. But they usually just have a handful of fueling stations and suppliers.
Fleet renewal is a pretty well understood budgeting process in any large scale logistics network (airlines, military, delivery..). You reach a point where replacing the fleet is a better investment than maintaining the current one.
To migrate to EVs, the USPS would likely wait out success in the private sector (like FedEx’s announcement) to demonstrate ROI, and retrofit this design or phase in a 2nd or 3rd iteration on it as a separate budget/RFP process.
Also one might be able to keep costs down by optimizing for cost rather than energy density. LiFeP04 cells have been comparatively expensive, but it seems price has been dropping lately. It's also a good choice for safety and durability reasons, and because they don't use cobalt which is sort of expensive and sort of rare. Not using cobalt means avoiding a resource that would bottleneck other manufacturers of EVs.
It'd be interesting to know what the actual specs are on the EV version of the USPS vans (battery type, capacity, etc...) and see if my speculation corresponds to what they chose. I don't know if they've released that publicly yet.
A 30kWh battery could easily be 5 or 10 thousand dollars, which may well be worth it to save on gas for a long time; on the other hand, gas engines are well-understood and really cheap, because we have a huge established industry that builds engines by the millions and has been optimizing for cost for over a hundred years.
This sounds a lot like the "Captain Samuel Vimes 'Boots' theory of socioeconomic unfairness" from Terry Pratchett that generally eventually gets quoted in this sorts of discussion.
https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/72745-the-reason-that-the-r...