Like a letter or package deal that was considered misplaced however lastly will get delivered, and after greater than 10 years of planning, deliberation and infighting, america Postal Service (USPS) has begun to problem its new electrical Subsequent Technology Supply Automobile to letter carriers.
The NGDVs are constructed by Oshkosh Protection, which gained the contract to make the autos in 2021. They’re being manufactured at a manufacturing facility in Spartanburg, South Carolina, and 75% of them might be battery-electric autos.
“Our huge expertise in delivering autos that excel in essentially the most demanding situations positions us to supply reliability, security and maintainability for many years forward,” mentioned Tim Block, President of Oshkosh Protection.
To say the NGDV stands out visually could be a substantial understatement. The car’s design features a big windshield and a low-slung hood, the latter of which was designed to permit the driving force—regardless of peak—to see the street, giving it the looks of a type of goofy mid-to-late twentieth century baseball- or baseball cap-shaped bullpen carts.
However letter carriers aren’t making enjoyable of the car or its appears.
The vans have a spread of 70 miles, greater than adequate for the day by day common of 12 to fifteen miles coated by a typical city letter service. Not like the autos they’re changing—the Grumman Lengthy Life Automobile, which was the primary metropolis letter service car for which the USPS developed specs versus shopping for off the shelf—they’ve air-con, a function that was roundly applauded by the half dozen nameless mail carriers who offered suggestions on the car.
The brand new autos even have extra space for packages, a nod to the Amazonification that the postal service has undergone, as letter carriers in the present day ship way more packages and much fewer letters and magazines than they did throughout the twentieth century.
Whereas the Grumman vans needed to be unloaded from the rear, which resulted in a couple of accidents and the occasional demise after they have been hit by oncoming autos, the brand new vans have the cargo door on one aspect, permitting packages to be unloaded straight onto the curb.
Letter carriers participated within the strategy of designing the specs for the brand new truck, which started in 2014. A few of their recommendations—together with non-skid surfaces, lights on the doorsteps and a 3rd solar visor for the windshield—have been included into the ultimate design. The vans even have the identical fundamental security options that new autos in the present day function, corresponding to airbags and driver-assistance applied sciences corresponding to automated emergency braking and a collision-avoidance system.
One letter service, Larry, who drives a battery-electric hybrid to work in New York Metropolis from Suffolk County utilizing the HOV lane, predicted to a reporter that the looks of the brand new electrical vans on streets will immediate the set up of charging stations that native staff can use as properly, which was really helpful by the Common Accounting Workplace in 2023. The chargers, he mentioned, would make it simpler for him to buy an EV for himself for his commute.
It’s clear that the NGDVs will allow postal couriers to serve with higher constancy, maybe someday reaching the excessive aspirational customary of the Persian mounted postal couriers Herodotus described in E book 8, Paragraph 98 of “The Persian Wars,” who “…are stopped neither by snow nor rain nor warmth nor darkness from undertaking their appointed course with all velocity.”
Supply: Oshkosh Protection
