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Why the new USPS mail trucks look so weird

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Re: Why the new USPS mail trucks look so weird

#261

Post by names_are_hard »

TylerE wrote: post #67
BadInformatics wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

TIL, thanks. Maybe it's different for rural areas, but here in (sub)urban Canada postal workers hit a few houses at a time (and you can tell because most of them wear comfortable walking shoes too). I just looked it up and it seems like their new electric vehicles aren't RHD either, would be curious to know how that decision transpired :)

On all but urban routes US mail carriers never get out of their vehicles, unless they have something too big to fit in the box.

In the NY suburb I grew up in, we had a mailbox attached to our house, not at the street. The house was set back from the road about 50 feet. The mail carrier would park their car, fill up a messenger bag, and walk around to a few houses and drop off the mail. Then they'd return to their car, move down the street a bit, and repeat. It was quite a bit of walking for the postal worker.

Re: Why the new USPS mail trucks look so weird

#262

Post by Johnny555 »

KingOfCoders wrote: post #223
cialowicz wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Having a nose that crumples is helpful in case of accidents. Turns out that VW Vanagons are deathtraps: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VmixmEkfLu0

Glad I've watched the video. It says the exactly opposite of your comment. The VW is safe, can be repaired and is comparable to normal cars with a hood. This happens so often in comment sections, people drop a lengthy video, noone wants to watch a 15 minute video and they have a "proof" for their argument.

and is comparable to normal cars with a hood

Well, at least when compared to cars from 1984. I wonder how it would fare against a modern car?

Cars are much safer today, the paper below says that the probability of a driver being killed in a new 2008-2012 car is 0.29 versus 0.42 in a new 1985-1993 model year car.

https://crashstats.nhtsa.dot.gov/Api/Public/ViewPublication/...

(another interesting finding from that paper is that the probability of death increases as the vehicle ages, even within the same model year)

Re: Why the new USPS mail trucks look so weird

#263

Post by Johnny555 »

The new trucks are odd looking for sure, but when they're commonplace they'll just be "normal" just like the current LLV mail trucks.

I'm glad they went with a utilitarian design, seems better to have a truck that does exactly what they want for the lowest cost than to spend money making it look "better" but also more expensive and/or less useful.

Re: Why the new USPS mail trucks look so weird

#264

Post by moooo99 »

cycomanic wrote: post #253
Robotbeat wrote: post #132

It's interesting that "cost" is the reason given for why these vehicles aren't electric, but... how could that be? Batteries for electric carmakers are not that expensive any more, maybe $150/kWh. LLVs are currently horrendously inefficient (fleet average of about 9mpg). They have a ~13 gallon tank for a range of about 120 miles. They drive about 18 miles a day on average (total fleet average, so some are idle and pr…

That's essentially what the German Post did. They developed their own all electric van the streetscooter. Unfortunately they could not turn it into a viable business and sell enough units to others, so they shuttered the operation last year. Quite unfortunate, because I believe the project was well ahead of its time.

iirc German Post didn't really develop the Streetscoter [1] themselves, instead they acquired the company that did. It was a start up lead by a professor from university Aachen and from what I can remember, they had quite a lot of problems besides the ones you mentioned. There were a lot of recalls and other problems, especially towards the end of the company [2]

The post employees also often complained about the relatively high loading edge for the storage box, which makes it super hard to load and unload heavy packages.

Regardless of the problems, I think it was a really good idea and a rather cool looking vehicle. And when it comes to urban streets in Germany, the street scooter probably was the perfect vehicle when it comes to space requirements.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/StreetScooter [2] (German) https://www.businessinsider.de/gruenderszene/allgemein/stree... [3] (German) https://www.elektroauto-news.net/elektroautos/streetscooter-...

Re: Why the new USPS mail trucks look so weird

#265

Post by clort »

SECProto wrote: post #226
innocenat wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

You'd be surprised how much load runs through a chain of streetlights. 3phase/400V and they pull heavy duty conductors through the conduit. Could definitely handle multiple 120v/15A equivalents (but it'd be way cheaper and more effective to pull dedicated conduit + conductor)

also: In my city (in UK) the lamp posts date from a long time ago. Only a few years ago all the sodium lamps were replaced by lower power LEDs, which presumably means that much of the cabling is now massively redundant.

Re: Why the new USPS mail trucks look so weird

#266

Post by kube-system »

Johnny555 wrote: post #262
KingOfCoders wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Glad I've watched the video. It says the exactly opposite of your comment. The VW is safe, can be repaired and is comparable to normal cars with a hood. This happens so often in comment sections, people drop a lengthy video, noone wants to watch a 15 minute video and they have a "proof" for their argument.

and is comparable to normal cars with a hood Well, at least when compared to cars from 1984. I wonder how it would fare against a modern car? Cars are much safer today, the paper below says that the probability of a driver being killed in a new 2008-2012 car is 0.29 versus 0.42 in a new 1985-1993 model year car. https://crashstats.nhtsa.dot.gov/Api/Public/ViewPublication/... (another interesting finding from that pap…

> (another interesting finding from that paper is that the probability of death increases as the vehicle ages, even within the same model year)

Looks like they don't speculate much on it -- they mention improvements in driver behavior over time and maintenance. Not bad, but my first thoughts were:

* a 20 year old vehicle is often driven by a person with a different socioeconomic situation than someone with a 1 year old vehicle, and those economic situations correlate heavily with other driving behaviors.

* as vehicles are getting safer and more powerful, highway speeds are rising, so 20 year old vehicle that are just keeping up with traffic are going faster than they used to.

Re: Why the new USPS mail trucks look so weird

#267

Post by froh »

moooo99 wrote: post #264
cycomanic wrote: post #253

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's essentially what the German Post did. They developed their own all electric van the streetscooter. Unfortunately they could not turn it into a viable business and sell enough units to others, so they shuttered the operation last year. Quite unfortunate, because I believe the project was well ahead of its time.

iirc German Post didn't really develop the Streetscoter [1] themselves, instead they acquired the company that did. It was a start up lead by a professor from university Aachen and from what I can remember, they had quite a lot of problems besides the ones you mentioned. There were a lot of recalls and other problems, especially towards the end of the company [2] The post employees also often complained about the rel…

and they developed it it "by themselves" i.e. by a company they acquired for that purpose, because neither the volkswagen group, nor mercedes/daimler were able or willing to just shipmelectric local delivery mini vans.

last year deutsche post lost two streetscooter CEOs for "diverging opinions on the future of streetscooter". deutsche post is now trying to sell their subsidiary.

Re: Why the new USPS mail trucks look so weird

#268

Post by lesdeuxmagots »

Robotbeat wrote: post #202
ratsforhorses wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

$200 won’t even cover the cost of the electrician’s labor. And beyond just the cost of materials and labor to actually do the thing, consider the cost of the consultation on what is actually possible for a given location, the time and cost of permitting, the time involved in all the paperwork such as the drafting and filing of the plans, etc. This isn’t and informal process like some exterior facing outlet you decide to add to your home as a weekend project after looking up a YouTube video and doing a Home Depot run.

Then there’s all the aggregate costs associated with switching. Maintenance of an EV requires different skills and different tooling. Establishing new or amending existing maintenance contracts, training new mechanics or retraining old ones, rewriting guidelines, purchasing new tools and equipment, etc. Many hundreds of thousands of dollars of costs per region.

And you’re going to do that across far-flung areas of the US, many which have a current EV install base near or at zero?

They have to work to transition this across tens of thousands of locations, while not jeopardizing the delivery of hundreds of millions of pieces of mail a day. And you’re going to suggest that they NOT take a slow phased approach? To transition one of the largest fleets of vehicles in the world?

Please. Consider for a moment you may be wrong. That things are not as simple as you think. That when every single person is trying to explain why, you shouldn’t automatically attempt to find ways to dismiss or invalidate what they have to say.

Re: Why the new USPS mail trucks look so weird

#269

Post by evgen »

akira2501 wrote: post #255
alacombe wrote: post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A 100 vehicle fleet would require not 100-200 Amps service, but 1500 Amp service, and that's a whole different problem.

Well, you've probably got 14 to 16 hours of time to phase that charge across your fleet. You're still going to need a lot of outlets, but you only need to feed power to 20-25% of them at a time.

In many locations the charging window is going to be a lot smaller than you think with longer routes and later deliveries pushing parts of the fleet into sub-10 hour charging windows. Now you have a need to shuffle power and charging across this local fleet in the middle of the night. Who exactly is going to be doing this? If you are automating it then you are making some very large bets on the charging infrastructure being 100% reliable.

It is a problem that sounds simple at first but becomes more complex when you actually dig into the details. A fleet that is ICE-ready on day one but which can be retrofitted to EV means that you are able to deploy something that works now and pick locations to test EV and all of the details that are involved in the process by doing partial upgrades as various locations. Overall, sounds like current plan is the smart one.

Re: Why the new USPS mail trucks look so weird

#270

Post by anoncake »

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…

> might have said the same thing if my mail carrier were a woman (which she is).

Probably. Most people who look like women are. But some are actually closeted non-binary people or trans men. In which case calling them a lady isn't offensive, but it hurts.

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