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Why the new USPS mail trucks look so weird

thedrive.com

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Re: Why the new USPS mail trucks look so weird

#201

Post by tolbish »

creato wrote: post #195
anoncake wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why do you have a problem with this "alternative" reality?

It's annoying to have to constantly wonder if I'm saying something offensive when I absolutely do not intend that. In this case, I wouldn't have thought anything was wrong with "mail lady" and might have said the same thing if my mail carrier were a woman (which she is). Now I read this thread and realize that some people would think it is a problem. This cultural wave of making seemingly harmless language into probl…

It's not that the term "mail lady" offends anyone. It doesn't.

The point is that singling out her gender is needless, and kinda seems a bit strange if gender was never really pertinent to the story in the first place.

"Cancel culture" would be going through high school recommended reading lists and removing books that focused "wrongly" on gender or something.

Re: Why the new USPS mail trucks look so weird

#202

Post by Robotbeat »

ratsforhorses wrote: post #189
s0rce wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe the charging infrastructure isn't available?

Just putting this out there.."Adapting a lamp post into a charging point for electric vehicles can cost as little as £2,000" Seems like a good infrastructure project ...

2000 pounds? Try $200 maybe. And these vehicles cost on the order of $40k. Penny wise and pound foolish to spend thousands of dollars on a combustion engine and drivetrain just because you're afraid of a $200 exterior outlet.

Re: Why the new USPS mail trucks look so weird

#203

Post by TylerE »

Robotbeat wrote: post #199
xyzzyz wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you have more than one vehicle that you need to charge, you need more than one outlet. Worse, you cannot just get connect all of them to one outlet through daisy chained extension cords: you need separate 120V circuit for each vehicle. Even if you are lucky enough to have multiple outlets around where you park your fleet, these will likely all be on the same circuit. This problem is of course solvable, you need to…

Nope. You only need a 15A branch per vehicle. You can install a 30A branch, too, if you like, and two poles of those are enough for 4 vehicles. For slow charging purposes, 120V exterior outlets are more than good enough and have commonly been used for government electric vehicles for decades.

Slow charging may not be fast enough. Around here, I'll sometimes see them making (mostly) parcel deliverys as late as 9PM, and then they're out in the morning at 4 or 5AM.

Re: Why the new USPS mail trucks look so weird

#204

Post by elihu »

kube-system wrote: post #181
Robotbeat wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

These vehicles ARE being phased in slowly. And installing 100-200 Amps of commercial service is cheap, and I actually think would largely be unnecessary as they can be set to charge at night when office demand is super low.

Does the electric code permit overallocation in that case? That's not my area of expertise but I doubt it does. And yes, installing service is "cheap" but it takes time.

It seems like the right way to charge a fleet of vehicles if your site has limited power is to have some central device that coordinates charging rates, so that together they only pull as much current as is available. You could also set priorities. That way you can install as many charge ports as you want, and just have to worry about whether you have enough power to charge all your vehicles every day.

I don't know if that sort of setup is commonly done or is allowed by code.

Re: Why the new USPS mail trucks look so weird

#205

Post by wahern »

aYsY4dDQ2NrcNzA wrote: post #187
Mountain_Skies wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My last house was serviced by RCAs. One had a Subaru Outback with a system of gears and pullies that let it be driven from the right side without removing the factory left side drive. Another had an actual right hand drive vehicle, probably imported. There's likely a small but strong demand for right hand drive vehicles that happen to end up in the US with RCAs buying most of them. A few simply had two people in the…

Please tell me you have photos of that driving setup.

Probably something like these examples:

https://www.thedrive.com/news/37520/these-trick-pulley-syste...

https://www.postalthings.com/right-hand-drive-kits

Re: Why the new USPS mail trucks look so weird

#207

Post by Robotbeat »

kube-system wrote: post #197
Robotbeat wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It takes way less time than building these vehicles will and can be done cheaply with local electricians. It’s strange how common magical thinking about EVs is, like electricity is this newfangled thing that we don’t understand and need massively new, poorly understood infrastructure. We don’t. And that’s a huge advantage.

I am not saying and have not said electricity is the hard part. The logistics of steering the world's highest volume postal operation (with financial issues as it stands) is the hard part. The USPS handles 43% of the world's mail. There are no projects of this size that aren't phased in, which is apparently what they are doing. Some of these vehicles will be electric, so it stands to reason that they will also be bui…

Except these vehicles are not going to be immediately dumped onto all USPS parking lots. They are going to be built over a period of years. Adding an outlet for each vehicle would cost on the order of 1% of the vehicle cost and would be paid for in fuel savings within a couple months.

Look, I don't know where this idea came from that electricity is this hard problem. It's not. As it is now, many of these LLVs have to be fueled sometimes multiple times per week. Simply plugging into an external outlet not only is cheap but will actually save time.

People who do not have electric cars keep looking for an inventing some kind of "gotcha," but they really are this easy. You literally can just use a normal external outlet to charge them, and even if you want faster charging (totally unnecessary and probably undesirable for this application), it costs maybe $1200 to get an RV hookup (equivalent to L2). I charge from an old dryer outlet, although sometimes use an exterior 120V. It really is that easy. In fact, I don't know if big USPS locations have refueling depots like bus depots do, but if they went electric, they'd be unnecessary and could be removed.

Re: Why the new USPS mail trucks look so weird

#208

Post by Robotbeat »

lazide wrote: post #198
Robotbeat wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It takes way less time than building these vehicles will and can be done cheaply with local electricians. It’s strange how common magical thinking about EVs is, like electricity is this newfangled thing that we don’t understand and need massively new, poorly understood infrastructure. We don’t. And that’s a huge advantage.

Many of these buildings are not owned by the USPS. Many of these buildings do not have adequate electrical right now. USPS has 30k buildings. Paying someone to build vehicles is much different than retrofitting buildings, each in a different jurisdiction, in many cases that you do not own, to allow plugging in a huge number of vehicles in all sorts of weather conditions - in the middle of often uncovered parking.

It's just not that hard. I charge in uncovered driveway. With an exterior outlet. In the winter or summer, doesn't matter. It's simply not that hard.

Re: Why the new USPS mail trucks look so weird

#209

Post by innocenat »

Robotbeat wrote: post #200
nradov wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At most post offices the trucks are parked outside without electrical outlets nearby. Sure those can be built but it will take a while. In many cases the circuit supplying the facility will have to be upgraded.

Any parking lot with lamp posts has electricity. Takes way less time to install an exterior outlet than it does to build a vehicle.

Are you implying that circuit driving the lamp posts can handle multiple 15A load?

Re: Why the new USPS mail trucks look so weird

#210

Post by [deleted] »

patrickyeon wrote: post #135
thepasswordis wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Okay I'm genuinely curious why "mail lady" wouldn't fly today. ...why not?

Gendered terms are becoming less popular to describe people in situations where their gender doesn't matter. So we might say "mail person" or "mail carrier", the same as we say "firefighter" instead of "fireman". It's not "cancel culture" as the sibling comment suggests; it's rarely people being outraged about imagined attacks. It's just language evolving as society evolves. As an added bonus, sticking with non-gende…

[deleted]
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