Donald Maston, president of the National Rural Letter Carriers’ Association, said canceling the program now would have the opposite effect, squandering millions of dollars.
“I think it would be shortsighted for Congress to now suddenly decide they’re going to try to go backwards and take the money away for the EVs or stop that process because that’s just going to be a bunch of money on infrastructure that’s been wasted,” he said.
Sen. Joni Ernst, R-Iowa, said “it didn’t make sense for the Postal Service to invest so heavily in an all-electric force.” She said she will pursue legislation to rescind what is left of the $3 billion from the Inflation Reduction Act allocated to help cover the $10 billion cost of new postal vehicles.
Ernst has called the EV initiative a “boondoggle” and “a textbook example of waste,” citing delays, high costs and concerns over cold-weather performance.
“For now,” she added, “gas-powered vehicles — use some ethanol in them — I think is wonderful.”
Corn-based ethanol is a boon to Iowa’s farmers, but the effort to reverse course has other Republican support.
Rep. Michael Cloud, R-Texas, a co-sponsor of the rollback effort, has said the EV order should be canceled because the project “has delivered nothing but delays, defective trucks, and skyrocketing costs.”
The Postal Service maintains that the production delay of the Next Generation Delivery Vehicles, or NGDVs, was “very modest” and not unexpected.
“The production quantity ramp-up was planned for and intended to be very gradual in the early months to allow time for potential modest production or supplier issues to be successfully resolved,” spokesperson Kim Frum said.
The “Deliver for America” plan calls for modernizing the ground fleet, notably the Grumman Long Life Vehicle, which dates back to 1987 and is fuel-inefficient at 9 mpg. The vehicles are well past their projected 24-year lifespan and are prone to breakdowns and even fires.
“Our mechanics are miracle workers,” said Mark Dimondstein, president of the American Postal Workers Union. “The parts are not available. They fabricate them. They do the best they can.”
In 2021, Oshkosh Defense was awarded a contract for up to 165,000 battery electric and internal combustion engine Next Generation vehicles over 10 years.
There’s also a new creature comfort: air conditioning.
Douglas Lape, special assistant to the president of the National Association of Letter Carriers and a former carrier, is among numerous postal employees who have had a say in the new design. He marvels at how Oshkosh designed and built a new vehicle, transforming an old North Carolina warehouse into a factory along the way.
“I was in that building when it was nothing but shelving,” he said. “And now, being a completely functioning plant where everything is built in-house — they press the bodies in there, they do all of the assembly — it’s really amazing in my opinion.”
The agency has so far ordered 51,500 NGDVs, including 35,000 battery-powered vehicles. To date, it has received 300 battery vehicles and 1,000 gas-powered ones.
Former Postmaster General Louis DeJoy said in 2022 the agency expected to purchase chiefly zero-emissions delivery vehicles by 2026. It still needs some internal combustion engine vehicles that travel longer distances.
Frum, the Postal Service spokesperson, said the planned NGDV purchases were “carefully considered from a business perspective” and are being deployed to routes and facilities where they will save money.
The agency has also received more than 8,200 of 9,250 Ford E-Transit electric vehicles it has ordered, she said.
Ernst said it’s fine for the Postal Service to use EVs already purchased.
“But you know what? We need to be smart about the way we are providing services through the federal government,” she said. “And that was not a smart move.”
Maxwell Woody, lead author of the University of Michigan study, made the opposite case.
Postal vehicles, he said, have low average speeds and a high number of stops and starts that enable regenerative braking. Routes average under 30 miles and are known in advance, making planning easier.
“It’s the perfect application for an electric vehicle,” he said, “and it’s a particularly inefficient application for an internal combustion engine vehicle.”
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Associated Press writer Hannah Fingerhut in Des Moines, Iowa, contributed to this report.
