February 4, 2022 – Upgrading the U.S. Postal Service’s truck fleet has been a long and controversial process. The USPS started looking for replacements for 150,000 or so Grumman Long Life Vehicles (LLVs) in around 2015.
For a while, it looked like the new fleet might be made up of mostly electric vehicles, but when the contract for the new mail trucks was awarded to Oshkosh Defense in the spring of 2021, the USPS said only 10 percent of the new mail trucks might be electric. One of the contenders for an electric truck, Workhorse, sued the USPS last summer over the deal.
Now the government is asking the USPS to pause on the $11.3 billion contract and reconsider the gas-powered truck purchases in the face of climate damage. The new Oshkosh trucks are just 0.4 mile per gallon more efficient compared to the outgoing LLVs—8.6 mpg versus 8.2 mpg for the older vehicles.
