USPS Chooses Oshkosh Defense to replace Grumman mail-delivery trucks...

Is this the ugliest vehicle ever produced?


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CraigB

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I’m really glad they’re finally getting a new vehicle.

the van does look like a cartoon version of a mail truck from the side.
 
I think someone stepped on the clay model and the designer didn't notice. Seems like a waste of space at the front, if this design made sense then companies would've been doing it for years.
 
That's a lot of glass. Bet that'll be comfy in the summer in hotter parts of the country.
 
It's utilitarian, which is exactly what it's supposed to be. The low hood and huge windscreen will help with maneuvering between parked cars and up to mailboxes. I think just about anything to replace the Grumman trucks looks great at this point - nothing against Grumman, the problems with those vehicles is mostly the GM Iron Duke engines; but in either case, the LLV has been limped along far longer than they were ever intended to last.

That's a lot of glass. Bet that'll be comfy in the summer in hotter parts of the country.
The LLV only has a small fan for cooling, I'm pretty sure this is going to be a significant improvement in the sun belt.
 
The design is yet to be finalized, but some will be electric.

:unsure: didn't some president decide and announce to make the entire federal fleet electric or something? including the usps fleet? and there i was wondering in the politics thread about what vehicle they could possibly go with and where to get the sheer number of vehicles from...
in any case: as an EV, the long snout of this thing really doesn't make sense - but if they're also doing ICE versions...

edit: is this just me being german or is it weird to anyone else how it's defense contractors (first grumman, now oshkosh) that are supplying these vehicles? is it just that they're so good at (the bureaucracy of) winning federal tenders or has anyone got any other reasonable explanation? i mean surely for a regular car/truck-maker it should surely come more naturally to build such a custom vehicle, right? or at least allow for bigger synergies? :dunno:
 
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:unsure: didn't some president decide and announce to make the entire federal fleet electric or something? including the usps fleet? and there i was wondering in the politics thread about what vehicle they could possibly go with and where to get the sheer number of vehicles from...
in any case: as an EV, the long snout of this thing really doesn't make sense - but if they're also doing ICE versions...

edit: is this just me being german or is it weird to anyone else how it's defense contractors (first grumman, now oshkosh) that are supplying these vehicles? is it just that they're so good at (the bureaucracy of) winning federal tenders or has anyone got any other reasonable explanation? i mean surely for a regular car/truck-maker it should surely come more naturally to build such a custom vehicle, right? or at least allow for bigger synergies? :dunno:

I don't know if it has anything to do with it, but many government purchases have to meet certain standards to be able to be purchased under GSA. It includes minimum requirements for locally-sourced components. For example, the office furniture company I sold had a couple of product lines that government agencies couldn't buy with their budgets because the electrical components came from Malaysia.. there were certain cubicle wall panel fabrics they couldn't pick because they came from Italy I'm sure is a big one for such huge purchases, and Grumman and Oshkosh are well-equipped to meet that need with a reliable pipeline for that sort of thing.
 
the van does look like a cartoon version of a mail truck from the side.
Exactly what I was thinking. But as long as it has its practical merits...

@eizbaer: Oshkosh is making special utility vehicles, not only military ones. They are also big in airfield fire trucks, for example.
 
Thanks for the input!

It includes minimum requirements for locally-sourced components.
Ah, could be something as simple as that - makes sense. I guess if you haven't experienced that madness, you wouldn't necessarily come to think of that :D

@eizbaer: Oshkosh is making special utility vehicles, not only military ones. They are also big in airfield fire trucks, for example.
Yeah, good thing if they have experience with these sort of vehicles... otherwise there may be issues (thinking of a certain delivery van start up from Aachen that got acquired by DHL/Deutsche Post). The name actually including "defense" sort of moved my thinking in a certain direction :)
 
This might not be final as Biden is due to nominate about 4 people to the board and shaft Trump's goon.
 
This needs to happen. I worked at Grumman in Muncy, Pennsylvania, for four days (that's all I could take of bucking rivets) back in 2001, and the mail trucks were old then. With some irony, I worked building UPS trucks for four days, and a couple of months later I got a job at UPS, where I worked for 6 years.
 
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This needs to happen. I worked at Grumman in Muncy, Pennsylvania, for four days (that's all I could take of bucking rivets) back in 2001, and the mail trucks were old then. With some irony, I worked building UPS trucks for four days, and a couple of months later I got a job at UPS, where I worked for 6 years.

Did you manage to drive a mail truck you put together? "Man, this thing sucks! *Reads tag* oh..."
 
Did you manage to drive a mail truck you put together? "Man, this thing sucks! *Reads tag* oh..."
I doubt that I drove any of the trucks that I built, but I may have. It's really not possible to know. Grumman trucks weren't terrible, but the company isn't known as Grumman anymore https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morgan_Olson

By the time I quit UPS in 2007, they were getting trucks in from other manufacturers.
 
When the board changes, the requirement for 10% or so electric is likely to increase massively
 
Bloomberg news:

Postal Service Stirs Ire by Buying Gas Trucks and a Few EVs​

The U.S. Postal Service currently plans for only 10% of its new truck fleet to be electric, Postmaster General Louis DeJoy said Wednesday, angering environmentalists who say the move flies in the face of a White House executive order to electrify the government’s vehicles.

DeJoy’s revelation in a hearing before a House panel comes the day after the Postal Service announced that Wisconsin-based maker of military trucks, Oshkosh Corp., had won a long-delayed $6 billion contract to replace the service’s fleet of gas-guzzling postal trucks.

The news sent the stock of Workhorse Group Inc., the only all-electric vehicle maker in the running, plunging as much as 60%. The Loveland, Ohio-based company has vowed to fight the decision, saying in a statement Wednesday it “intends to explore all avenues” available to it in the government bidding process.

Oshkosh rose as much as 16%, the most intraday since 2018.
“The lack of commitment from the USPS to electrify its fleet directly contradicts the Biden administration’s goals and executive order to clean up pollution from the US government’s vehicles,” said Gina Coplon-Newfield, director of the Sierra Club’s Clean Transportation for All campaign.

Dejoy, in testimony before the House Oversight Committee, said committing to a greater number of electric vehicles would be too expensive. “We don’t have the 3 or 4 billion dollars in our plan right now, that it would take to do it,” DeJoy said. “But we’re happy to talk with the administration and with this Congress.”

The Postal Service on Tuesday gave Oshkosh an initial award as part of a 10-year contract to build as many as 165,000 mail trucks. The service said in a statement that the delivery trucks would be “either fuel-efficient internal combustion engines or battery electric powertrains and can be retrofitted to keep pace with advances in electric vehicle technologies.”

In an interview, John Pfeifer, Oshkosh’s president and chief operating officer, said the company had designed a vehicle that could use either an internal combustion propulsion system or a battery-electric one and they were designed to be retrofitted to batteries “as that technology evolves.”

“You have the ability to change compulsion systems as technology develops,” Pfeifer said. “This perfectly dovetails with what” Biden has ordered “because we provide a very cost effectively electric vehicle for the Postal Service.”

But the move to use internal combustion engines has enraged environmentalists and other electric-vehicle backers who say EVs would save the Postal Service on maintenance and fuel.

“It’s really, really disingenuous to call this electric in any way,” Joe Britton, executive director of the Zero Emission Transportation Association, said in a phone interview. “This flies in the face of what both the administration and Congress want to see.”

The Postal Service operates 225,000 vehicles, making it the largest part of the federal fleet. Many of the current USPS vehicles only get about 10 miles per gallon, or worse gas mileage than a Humvee. Biden, in his first day in office, signed an executive order, calling on the government to use its procurement power to transform the government’s fleet of 645,000 into clean-energy vehicles.

White House spokespeople did not respond to emailed requests for comment on the plan, including how it complied with Biden’s fleet electrification plans.

The Postal Service receives no tax dollars for operating expenses and relies on the sale of postage, products and services to fund its operations. It’s run by a board of governors who are nominated by the U.S. president to staggered terms, and who select the postmaster general.

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The “U.S. Postal Service’s decision to not replace its fleet with electric vehicles is a glaring mistake,” said Senator Martin Heinrich, a New Mexico Democrat. “I would urge Postmaster General DeJoy to go back to the drawing board. Otherwise, it will be hard not to view this as yet one more harmful decision by Postmaster General DeJoy to compromise the operations of the Postal Service.”

The award to Oshkosh ends a procurement saga that began in 2015 as the post office sought to replace it’s ubiquitous fleet of gas guzzling Grumman long life vehicles -- many of which are more than 30 years old -- with newer and more environmentally friendly options. But the process was set by delay after delay, due to, among other factors safety issues that included prototype vehicles with leaky fuel tanks and faulty brakes that led field testing to be halted.

The decision to shun Workhorse, which didn’t respond to a request for comment, came as a surprise to investors and analysts who considered the company a shoe-in for at least part of the postal contract.

“This award to Oshkosh is downright shocking,” said Craig Irwin, an analyst with Roth Capital Partners LLC. “It’s outrageous. This decision from the post office does not make any sense.”

But the decision to award Oshkosh has proponents as well, such as Paul Steidler, a senior fellow at the Lexington Institute, a policy group that favors limited government.

“The Postal Service needs trucks now,” Steidler said. “The Postal Service also should not be a guinea pig for the latest and greatest designs in electric vehicles. Replacing a 30-year-old, noxious, gas guzzling vehicle with a new combustion engine truck is still a big win for the environment.”
 
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