Commissioner Ruth Goldway, who serves on the Postal Regulatory Commission, really likes the idea of an electric future for postal vehicles.Her office recently gave these stats:
The USPS fleet has more than 200,000 vehicles, 142,000 of them dedicated to daily local mail delivery. Most of them are the Long-Life Vehicles and were placed into service between 1987 and 1994 with a projected service life of 20 years.
Thanks to good maintenance and a pretty good product by Grumman (and maybe some bailing wire and gum), these vehicles are hanging in there. But they won't last forever.
The primary issue concern with LLVs, besides their age, is the fuel efficiency. The 2.4 liter engine only gets between 8-10 MPG -- which works out to about 25 cents a mile, depending on the cost of fuel.
Goldway wants to change that and is pushing for the LLVs to be replaced with electric models. Her office states that even with amortized cost of replacement batteries and depending on the local cost of electricity, a battery-powered LLV should cost between 8-12 cents a mile to operate.
And regular maintenance of electric vehicles is only 40 percent of gasoline models.
What do you think? Comment here.
9 comments:
I love the idea of electric and alternative fuel vehicles. If we lead the way, these vehicles will become more common and less expensive to purchase. I wish a deal could be worked out so our rural carriers could buy them at a discounted price, too - or even all postal employees. Think of the impact we could have on the economy and the environment.
Don't mind electric- but if we use it can we also generate our own with wind power- Think of that savings!
I'm not a Rural Carrier but allowing them to purchase the vehicles sounds like a good idea for advertising and the environment. Is there a legal problem that would only allow them to drive it while on duty?
It all sounds good right now but if the cap and trade bill passes the senate they could become very expensive to drive. Check out the 20% increase in electricity in Spain (and 17% unemployment) since they passed a similar bill 3 years ago.
The prospect of an electric fleet sounds good. My concern is in the overall quality of the vehicle. Statistics have shown that many U.S. vehicles do not perform at length without numerous repairs. This has lead to the downfall in domestic car sales. A great warranty should be negotiated so that the USPS does get stuck with problematic vehicles.
I am curious about the life of the batteries this type of vehicle uses. Any idea? Also it would be good to have the stats and interior views of our future LLV. Thanks.
The 2.2l engine is rated between 18 and 24 mpg. Don't know where she got her numbers but they are wrong.
If you are talking about where the numbers for the 2.4l LLVs came from ... USPS keeps track of costs through the VMFs Vehicle Management Accounting System (VMAS). Every fuel up, either from a postal-owned tank or from a commercial vendor (using the Voyager card) is tracked, as is utilization through the AVUS program. Vehicles may be "rated" a certain number, but actual driving numbers are often different.
The problem with tracking fuel numbers is that they only track the actual gas that is used. They tell us they get 60-80 mpg, but how many of those miles were electicity and how many are actual gas? Some reports that I have read show that once they go back on gas that the mpg drops to like 20-24 mpg. Also, no one seems to be quoting the cost of the electical recharging costs! Like the reader above talked about, how about the battery costs? I have read the cost of replacing the batteris is nearly $350 a year! I have a boat and multipule recharges on my batterey causes it to die after a year or two.
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