> The gross vehicle weight rating of the NGDV with an ICE, including payload, is 8,501 lb (3,856 kg),[2]: Table 3-1.2 just one pound over the EPA's threshold to be considered a heavy-duty truck, allowing it to avoid more stringent pollution emissions and efficiency standards for light-duty trucks.
Is the NGDV heavier because it's "better" (=more capable) or is its size and weight really to do with avoiding the EPA threshold - or even that it's derived from a full-size US truck?
710kg for the Deutsche vehicle is only for the payload, that doesn't include the weight of the vehicle.
I found a PDF fact sheet for the vehicle [1], it looks like the gross vehicle weight rating (vehicle + payload) is 2,800kg. That is still 1,000kg less than the USPS vehicle, but I wouldn't be suprised if that comes down to a combination of capacity, safety requirements, and maybe top speed needs in the US compared to the average European city.
> 710kg for the Deutsche vehicle is only for the payload, that doesn't include the weight of the vehicle
for StreetScooter Work
Curb/Unladen Weight: 1,275 kg (2,811 lbs)
Max Laden Weight (Gross Vehicle Weight Rating): 2,130 kg (4,696 lbs)
NGDV with an ICE (according to the OP)
Curb/Unladen Weight: 2,523 kg (5,560 lbs)
> I found a PDF fact sheet for the vehicle
That datasheet appears to be for the Work L which is a different model: "Shown in September 2016 at the IAA Commercial Vehicles trade fair, the Work L prototype is a longer and slightly higher vehicle with almost double the cargo volume"[0]
> I wouldn't be suprised if that comes down to a combination of capacity, safety requirements, and maybe top speed needs in the US compared to the average European city
I'm not able to judge capacity or safety requirements, but the Work's maximum speed is 120 km/h (75mph).
The emissions standards make zero sense here. USPS trucks don't spend hardly any time on normal driving. They move 10 feet, stop, move 10 feet, stop, etc. Emissions standards aren't set up around that, and I would not expect them to pass.
There are red flags, though. From another article:
> While the specific numbers vary based on a vehicle’s exact dimensions—information the USPS considers trade secrets—Sperling estimates a light duty truck approximately the size of a USPS delivery truck would need to achieve something in the neighborhood of 30 mpg to pass federal regulations
Maybe I am overly optimistic but they generally are not carrying a lot of weight, fairy local and lots of stop and starts. Would have been amazing to at least get some hybrids in the mix.
I don’t know the details… but my dad was a rural mail carrier for awhile, and the roughness of the driving they do is difficult to understand.
Rural carriers operate their own vehicles. The wear and tear was nuts… for example we would change brake pads every 2-3 weeks.
I think USPS wants to operate vehicles for many years. I’d guess they may have determined that the regen braking or batteries for hybrid couldn’t sustain the harsh conditions within the operating cost envelope.
FWIW: Regen breaking has a lot less wear than normal breaking. Normal breaking needs to convert the energy into heat through friction, which wears things down. Storing that energy means nothing has to be worn down.
For an application like this one, it's possible to use capacitors instead of batteries for a near-infinite lifespan too. A supercapacitor won't store enough charge for driving any sane distance, but for one stop and acceleration (regen breaking), it's perfectly adequate.
Buses sometimes have flywheels for that purpose, too. Although that also has weight and space, so may not be worthwhile for a vehicle where both are needed for its primary purpose.
Where I live, the stops are too long for a flywheel to make any sense. The postal worker will usually deliver to a mailbox serving several houses, and will often have packages. Perhaps in the suburbs, where there are individual mailboxes for each house, it could work well.
Still, if we take 8000 lbs, times (10mph)^2, and divide by 2, we get about 35kJ. First supercap which came up in a Google search does 1kJ for <$10. So it's like $350, and will have far less maintenance and better efficiency than a flywheel.
If we do 20mph -- although goodness knows mail trucks here don't go nearly that fast for start-and-stop between mailboxes -- it's $1400. Even 40mpg would be around $5k.
So it's very cheap (and, electronically, very easy), at least for this use case. For highway speeds, it'd be a different story.
2-3 weeks to change brake pads seems incredibly excessive and to be honest I don't believe it. I delivered Pizzas for more than 5 years, and my brake pads would still last 20,000+ miles.
1000lbs is a lot of weight. Mail routes include package deliveries as well as mail and package pickups. Some business deliveries have large transactions every day.
> fairy local and lots of stop and starts.
Mail routes are not identical and there are plenty of rural USPS offices which deliver to the property.
> to at least get some hybrids in the mix.
Part of the point is to not have a mix to avoid all the attendant problems that creates.
A small sedan can hold 5 adults in a pinch, but if you always drove your average sedan with 1,000lbs inside, and stopped every house, it would wear out extremely quickly and would drive/perform awful. Moreover, most small cars aren't actually rated to hold the weight of 5 adults, despite having 5 seats.
I just picked up 900 lbs of tile and the place would refuse to put anymore in my Subaru Forester. It's a pretty substantial load with big safety ramifications if not stored well.
Most sedans made today, the average max carry weight of a sedan is 900lb. And even at 900lb you fuel economy and performance is far less than "just fine."
Also cargo weight distribution is far different than people, with the lion share of packages being placed in the rear have of the vehicle and not evenly distributed amongst the front and rear axle.
1000lb of cargo is a lot to ask from any sedan and expect it to do it 8 hours a day, 6 days a week for 20+ years, isn't something I think you would find possible.
I live in a very rural area. We don't even have the 1980s era of mail trucks here, out delivery drivers have passenger SUVs and vans retrofitted for right hand drive.
I'd be really surprised to see these new vehicles in truly rural areas any time soon.
That's because the mail trucks are not considered suitable for longer and higher speed routes. I would expect them to roll out to rural areas quickly so the USPS can get rid of the mishmash fleet.
But there is going to be a mix? Also 1000 lbs is not a lot of weight to account for here. Ignoring rural routes which are a different beast, these routes are local on mostly slower roads. That kind of weight needs to be accounted for but it’s negligible.
As a kid I had a six hour paper round and a bicycle. I had my newspapers dropped off for me at four stops and nobody ever stole from them before I could get there - imagine that. In total, the mass of papers was about five times my own height, clearly a bit much to carry in one go.
My 'cargo' was heavier than that of the postman, but that was in the days before ecommerce, and the post service (UK) handled packages differently, sending them out in different vehicles to what the letters went out in, if over a certain size.
I also had to go to the door, not a mailbox at the side of the road. I was quicker than the postman with his cumbersome van. I was also quieter and more eco-friendly.
I am not suggesting that the post service in America have teenage lads on bicycles delivering letters and parcels, however, there is a lot to be said for having smaller vehicles.
Assuming I had one of these vehicles for free and all the fuel for it for free, would I have wanted one or been able to do my job quicker?
Probably not, even if scaled down to half the size for UK roads. Maybe my opinion would differ mid winter and if I was middle aged. However, I would not have my stashes in bus stops, all 30 ft of newspapers would be in the van. There would be no incentive to optimise.
Weight is your enemy in the delivery game and these vehicles are huge, yet typically American sized. If carrying a parcel to a door then that is going to be less than ten kilos in most cases, but if we assume 10kg, does that really need a vehicle with stuff weighing 300x upwards?
What they really needed was a range extending EV. These are not Prius style hybrids but they have a generator that runs at optimal RPM to charge the main battery. The original BMW EV, the i3 had this and it was a tech that wasn't really needed since those cars were overpriced and only ever did city journeys where the range extender was not needed.
The range extender can be chucked out as charging infrastructure improves and the battery can be updated to a new one that has more oomph for the same weight/size.
as usual with any large-scale procurement decision, it is a whole lot of politics. the anti-EV people were pushing against it, the defense contractors that run the government had more experience in gas powered vehicles, and the environmentalists were pushing for impractical targets like 100% EV, which just gave ammunition to the people who didn't want EVs.
the cool thing here seems to be that practicality is actually going to win out, and the postal trucks will end up being EVs on routes where that makes sense, and internal combustion on routes where EVs don't make sense.
Its probably too soon to know if that pressure succeeding was lucky or a mistake.
I love the idea of having an all electric fleet if it's feasible and better than the alternatives. I also have to assume the original plan to only electrify part of the fleet has functional reasons behind it.
If those reasons are overcome, or if that decision was somehow entirely political, then the pressure is lucky. Otherwise...we'll see?
Depends on driving habits and price of electricity and gas. In Washington state, electricity is cheaper compared to most of the US, and gas is among the most expensive compared to most of the US.
For less than ~10k miles per year, the higher up front cost of an electric vehicle and the greater depreciation due to eventual battery replacement might make a hybrid gas vehicle still cheaper per mile.
But for high mileage, high frequency of stop and go driving, I imagine all electric is cheapest?
Electric is likely cheapest considering duty cycle and fuel usage, and the battery should not need to be replaced for hundreds of thousands of miles, at which point we will have better batteries that last even longer and are cheaper.
> might make a hybrid gas vehicle still cheaper per mile
I agree. What is unconscionable is deploying 10s of thousands of vehicles that spend every day of operation accelerating rather quickly then coming to a full stop within a few seconds without using regenerative braking.
The published ratings of battery depreciation are per-mile, because there’s not really any other way to straightforwardly measure it, but the chemistry of battery degradation is very complex, and factors like number of high-current heating cycles and depth of discharge definitely matter.
the problem is we aren't comparing person vehicles, you have to consider these vehicles are estimated to need a 20+ year life span which mean replacing the batteries at least once, most likely twice. electric vehicle metrics are also not based on carrying a heavy load, at start and stop distances, moving at too low a speed to really benefit from reclamation.
The truth is, we have no real data to tell us how electric vehicles will fair over the expected time length with this expected work load.
When you factor in the building of instructor for charging stations, and their maintenance.
Remember USPS provides universal service. How do you sustain an electric fleet everywhere in the US in 2024?
If the postal service was run by a normal board and we had a less insane political environment, we’d build charging infrastructure to make to make it work. Alas, we live in this timeline.
It shouldn't be too big of a deal to have an ice and an ev share a truck style vehicle, because there's going to be structural support for batteries and probably room for them too; possibly requiring a higher load floor, but depends on design, I guess. Sounds like the target EV range is 70 mi, so the battery pack won't be super large.
Ford makes the F-150 in ice, hybrid, phev, and full ev, I think.
Hybrids are great until it comes to long term maintenance where you are not having to manage and work on two different systems. Having personal who can work on both electrical and gas has been one of the issues with the hybrid adoption in fleet vehicles with other groups.
Not to say it isn't worth exploring, but I do know it is a common issue when discussed.
There was a huge fight over what proportion of these trucks would be electric. Wikipedia says 75% of the initial order of 60,000 trucks will be electric, and after 2026 they will all be electric.
> The problem, Dejoy said, wasn’t that he didn’t want electric vehicles. Rather, the expense of the vehicles, compounded by the costs of installing thousands of charging stations and upgrading electrical service, made them unaffordable at a time when the agency was reporting big operating deficits every quarter.
It is worth reading the full article, it covers the environmental aspects and tradeoffs very well.
"Based on" meaning that's what they started with: the same heavy delivery truck that everyone uses. It's clearly not a Transit (USPS already has E Transits in service) but they obviously didn't just take a light truck and then add a pound to skirt emissions, either.
>builders there regularly paid off our corrupt mayor to avoid the rules.
I stopped being an electrical sub-contractor after a local mansion builder told me to "stop worrying about the other trades[†], I have insurance for a reason."
†: floor-heat guy wanted to run his 35A through my 16A circuit, "don't make this harder than it needs to be."
Nope that's how CAFE standards work. You can thank the EPA for that!
Instead of building more efficient small cars it becomes impossible to make them meet the efficiency requirements without making the car cost so much extra through fines. So instead you just get more "trucks" and SUVs. No more sedans! Those are the vehicles killing the planet!
You can thank Congress for that, not the EPA. They were the ones that required the agency by law to create the separate standards for “non-passenger vehicles” and the weight classes, as well as the other loopholes that enable the shenanigans, like allowing medium passenger vehicles to classify as non-passenger.
The degree to which this is broken boggles the mind. The country has a strong interest in reducing fuel consumption and emissions, and the country also has an interest in vehicles being lighter. And the rules utterly fail at both.
I don’t know what the right fix is, but completely abolishing CAFE and replacing it with a carbon tax might be a good start.
Now that chevron deference was eliminated (along with many other long-standing precedents), soon you’ll get to blame political appointees with lifetime positions!
Theoretically this would be a great opportunity for someone to take the EPA to court over this and have a chance of it actually having an effect, whereas before that was unimaginable. Of course it will require deep pockets, but a coalition of automakers could perhaps make it happen.
Are you saying that the chevron deference elimination allows the courts to overrule congress? I don't think that's the case. I think the courts still can only overrule congress on constitutional issues, the same as before the chevron deference was eliminated.
But then so are the bureaucrats. Hence the ass-backwards emissions policy we have now. The different is courts are compelled to hear well-reasoned arguments from experts on both sides and adjudicate based on their analysis, whereas bureaucrats can and do turn a deaf ear to anyone that doesn’t toe the party line.
Not to mention the flex fuel scheme that GM, Ford and Chrysler pulls. CAFE fuel mileage calculations permits ethanol compatible vehicles to assume that it will be driven 50% of the time using E85 ethanol. For the worst gas guzzlers, they add the additional ethanol hardware to get the “lower” fuel mileage. Hence you only see the flex fuel badge on big trucks and SUVs. And ironically, the flex fuel label is really a label that it’s a gas guzzler.
Is the limit really 8500 to get into that unregulated category? Small SUVs are very popular and are basically sedans on stilts and weigh a lot less than 8500. So I don’t think you could blame the death of sedans on that rule, if that’s indeed what the rule is.
There are other standards that can put vehicles in different emissions categories. I believe the one that most crossover SUVs target is being considered “off road”, by having four wheel drive and meeting a few ground clearance specifications: https://www.ecfr.gov/current/title-49/part-523#p-523.5(b)
The goal of promoting these small SUVs instead of sedans is actually because they’re quite fuel efficient: being in the same category as much larger trucks, they pull up the average fuel economy and take the pressure off manufacturers to make their highly-profitable bigger SUVs more efficient.
GVWR includes passengers and cargo when fully loaded.
8000 lbs is not totally crazy for a delivery vehicle. It probably weighs at least 2000-3000 lbs empty (with batteries).
Imagine a small business that tries to mail ten pound boxes. If they can fit ten by ten per layer in the van, once the pile of boxes is five layers tall, you’re basically at the van’s specs.
Private passenger vehicles is under 10% of global CO2 emissions. Electricity and heating is about 4x. Manufacturing and construction 2x, farming 2x, freight 1x. Repurposed light commercial vehicles would be a tiny fraction of those numbers. I suspect they are not what's killing the planet.
Broken out per-pound, I suspect that private passenger vehicles represent a disproportionate amount of unnecessary global emissions.
Or another way: heating and cooling, farming, etc. are all essential (if not necessarily optimal). Commuting in your own private car is not; one only has to spend 15 minutes on the average American highway to observe that the overwhelming majority of car traffic is one person driving a car that can fit 5 or more.
Sounds dubious considering the amount of CO2 emissions caused by uneaten / wasted food is similar to personal transportation emissions.
I also don't think the idea that we should strive to limit our lives to that which is absolutely necessary to only survive or generate economic activity is valid. To me, my drive to the beach with my dog is more essential, valid, and valuable than your commute to work.
But regardless of whether true or not, environmental destruction caused by CO2 emissions does not care if the emissions were "necessary" or not, by any definition of necessary. So it simply isn't personal light trucks that are what's destroying the world.
There is a simple way to find out what is “destroying the world”.
Keep increasing fossil fuel taxes until the target amount of carbon emissions is achieved. The consumption that goes away is what was “destroying the world”.
>To me, my drive to the beach with my dog is more essential, valid, and valuable than your commute to work.
And this is why efforts to curb emissions and other pollution is hopeless.
Emissions and pollution are a function of energy consumption. Energy = force times distance. Force = mass * acceleration * distance. So you either reduce the mass that is moving (including you, your dog, and your 5+ passenger vehicle) and/or reduce the distance you move, or don’t worry about pollution.
> Keep increasing fossil fuel taxes until the target amount of carbon emissions is achieved. The consumption that goes away is what was “destroying the world”.
You haven't arrived here by any reasoning, you're just working back from the outcome you want. I.e., you want to define "unnecessary emissions" or "least expensive to cut emissions" as what is destroying the world. But if carbon pollution is destroying the world, then any carbon pollution causes basically the same damage to the world as any other. That's the climate and environmental science. When you bring economics into it you're bringing in arbitrary wants, desires, what people inherited at birth, etc., that has nothing to do with the impact to the world of additional carbon in the atmosphere.
Here's a concrete counter-example. If you raise carbon price, virtuous billionaires and politicians will continue to fly their private jets to climate conferences while more people starve from increased food costs. That doesn't mean the meagre eating habits of those now deceased poor people was what was destroying the world rather than the exorbitant consumption by the ruling class that could have been a zoom meeting. In fact both were equally contributing (ton for ton) because the climate doesn't care where the CO2 came from, if it was ethical or economical or necessary or fair or anything else. Either the carbon is emitted into the atmosphere, or it isn't.
> And this is why efforts to curb emissions and other pollution is hopeless.
I think it's only hopeless so long as those pushing it are massive hypocrites. Nobody likes a hypocrite. Nobody likes injustice.
> If you raise carbon price, virtuous billionaires and politicians will continue to fly their private jets to climate conferences while more people starve from increased food costs
You offset the carbon tax with a universal tax credit or refund or UBI or whatever you want to call it. Give people all of the money back that was generated from the carbon tax. Poor people don't fly on private jets or buy yachts so they'll come out ahead. Or at least, less behind than those who do spend money on those things.
You can put a blindfold on and throw lots of darts at the board, sure. I was specifically addressing the idea that economics somehow determines which CO2 producing activity is destroying the world and which isn't. CO2 is CO2.
I don't know what your first sentence means. A carbon tax puts into focus which carbon emissions are truly essential, and which ones are optional, expressed by the spending choices consumers make. If you have it in place and most voters agree with the principle (because they make money) then you move the tax rate slider up or down to get carbon emissions to whatever level is enough.
My first sentence means that UBI doesn't change anything to somehow make the offered definition of what kind of carbon pollution is destroying the world valid.
"Essential" doesn't mean anything to the physics of climate change, it just means something like "what people choose to do".
> Here's a concrete counter-example. If you raise carbon price, virtuous billionaires and politicians will continue to fly their private jets to climate conferences while more people starve from increased food costs. That doesn't mean the meagre eating habits of those now deceased poor people was what was destroying the world rather than the exorbitant consumption by the ruling class that could have been a zoom meeting.
You going to the beach with your dog in a big pickup truck, along with a couple hundred million other people, is the same level of non essential as people flying in private jets (of which there are very, very few).
People in the developed nation’s middle/upper middle class like to think they not consuming multiple standard deviations above the mean, because they don’t fly on private jets, but they do.
> But if carbon pollution is destroying the world, then any carbon pollution causes basically the same damage to the world as any other. That's the climate and environmental science. When you bring economics into it you're bringing in arbitrary wants, desires, what people inherited at birth, etc., that has nothing to do with the impact to the world of additional carbon in the atmosphere.
Yes, obviously any fossil fuel tax that meaningfully reduces consumption has to create a floor for quality of life, such as a minimum level of nutrition, shelter, healthcare, education, etc. The amount of wealth redistribution necessary to get there very well might make it so many people cannot (regularly) drive to the beach in a pickup truck with their dog.
The fact that increasing gas taxes in the US is a political nonstarter should indicate how much we (the broad voting populace) value our standards or dreams of consumption, which are multiple standard deviations above the mean.
> You going to the beach with your dog in a big pickup truck, along with a couple hundred million other people, is the same level of non essential as people flying in private jets (of which there are very, very few).
Again, whatever level of nonessential you claim it might be and however you measure that, is irrelevant to what is destroying the environment.
Did you not take anything from the previous comment I made? The fact that your idea of "non-essential" means that poor people starve to death while rich people fly around in private jets to parties and vacations. Do you acknowledge that was wrong, or at least proved that the economic measurement of "essential" that you invented is totally arbitrary? I don't see how you can just keep going on without acknowledging this and addressing it.
This isn't even close. Cars globally emit 4x as much CO2 as the global fleet.
You might be referring to sulphur emissions, which are much higher for ships because they are basically unregulated, while car fuel has virtually zero sulphur.
Interestingly, that used to be true, but in the past few years some regulations have gone into effect regarding sulfur emissions in cargo ships.
I think that was probably a good thing in the long run, but there's some evidence that the sulfur particulate matter was "hiding" some of the warming we "should" have been seeing based on our CO2 emissions, because global warming has spiked a bit as sulfur has decreased.
You’ve literally made the point. How many boats are there? Compared to cars? My guess is we as a species don’t have anywhere near 1/4 the number of cars as boats worldwide. I would be flabbergasted if the number of boats (with motors) was even 1/10 the number of cars.
Boats pollute massively and it’s a shame considering that water is a much more efficient medium of transportation thanks to buoyancy.
> Boats pollute massively and it’s a shame considering that water is a much more efficient medium of transportation thanks to buoyancy.
It’s a good thing people don’t use container ships to commute every day, then…
Seriously, comparing the effect of one car to that of one ship is not even remotely useful. Cars would be much better if they were used by more than one person on average. At which point we could even scale them up and operate them among fixed, predictable routes at fixes, predictable times.
Anyway, no, they really are not making your point. Comparing the emissions of the global shipping fleet to that of all the cars used to commute every day tells a lot about where efficiency can be found. Sure, some shipping is frivolous, but then a single person (or even two people) commuting in a light truck is beyond stupid on every level.
Yes but this is not some incredible realization. Cars transport individuals (up to a family) whereas these enormous ships are the backbone of global shipping and commerce. Not to say they can’t run cleaner but this comparison is pointless.
Careful: People often confuse CO2 emissions with NOx emissions when discussing ships.
The main concern with big ocean vessels is that they burn fuel "dirtier", as opposed to cars which--in most countries--are already subject to emissions standards and mandatory catalytic-converters etc. because people got tired of smog and acid-rain.
On a pure CO2 basis, ships may actually be the lesser-evil in terms of payload/distance, lack of alternatives, etc.
Would you like to explain how the transportation system with less emissions per kilogram per mile is causing more harm than one of the least efficient forms of terrestrial transport?
Source: https://www.vice.com/en/article/the-new-usps-trucks-would-pr...
Not sure if that's still valid (obviously not for the electric versions), but that is actually insane.