USPS is getting new trucks but only 10% are electric

[ProjectBox153]

22 minutes ago, poochyena said:

you should. Its a claim you made, so explain it.

You're the one who brought up the distances that can be traveled. You said that a Tesla can cross Iowa on a single charge. The route a postal truck takes is not across a state, and it's definitely not at highway speeds for the majority of the trip. 

I'm done going back and forth about this. Find someone else to argue with. 

[DeScruff]

3 hours ago, ProjectBox153 said:

Lol.

The route that a mail vehicle takes is nowhere near comparable to driving in a straight line. That's a pointless comparison. 

One of the issues I can think of right off when it comes to getting a charging infrastructure in place is capacity. Another is reliability. There's a reason that they aren't starting will more electric vehicles than they are. 

1 hour ago, poochyena said:

you should. Its a claim you made, so explain it.

The point is that 300 miles while it sounds like a long distance when your going from point A to point B, is not that long if you are traveling twisty windy roads to every nook and cranny in a town which a mail truck does.
My own neighborhood/block is a giant loop, Ive found biking around it, it is ~1 mile. If you bike down all the culdesacs, its ~2 miles. If you take the "Mail Truck Route" you end up traveling 3 miles. - Why? Cause you gotta go through the loop twice, to deliver to the people on both sides of the road.

The mileage adds up a lot faster then you initially think. Apparently the highest mileage mail truck got 402,000 miles in ~10 years?
That said... Apparently the longest mail route according to some quick googling is ~187 miles, and is not ideal highway road.

 

[poochyena]

1 hour ago, ProjectBox153 said:

You're the one who brought up the distances that can be traveled.

??? No i'm not. I was replying to someone who said "yeah, in places like Iowa, and Idaho, and Wyoming, gas is required given the distances needed to travel. " and I pointed out that is wrong as some electric cars can travel across the *entire* state.

4 minutes ago, DeScruff said:

The point is that 300 miles while it sounds like a long distance when your going from point A to point B, is not that long if you are traveling twisty windy roads to every nook and cranny in a town which a mail truck does.

uhh.. 300 miles is 300 miles. This reminds me of the "which is heavier 100 pounds of feathers or 100 pounds of bricks" thing. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uH0hikcwjIA

 

[PlayStation 2]

2 minutes ago, DeScruff said:

The point is that 300 miles while it sounds like a long distance when your going from point A to point B, is not that long if you are traveling twisty windy roads to every nook and cranny in a town which a mail truck does.
My own neighborhood/block is a giant loop, Ive found biking around it, it is ~1 mile. If you bike down all the culdesacs, its ~2 miles. If you take the "Mail Truck Route" you end up traveling 3 miles. - Why? Cause you gotta go through the loop twice, to deliver to the people on both sides of the road.

The mileage adds up a lot faster then you initially think. Apparently the highest mileage mail truck got 402,000 miles in ~10 years?
That said... Apparently the longest mail route according to some quick googling is ~187 miles, and is not ideal highway road.

For anyone who can't contextualize how much driving delivery trucks do in a day, I notice that datasheets for the trucks at my FedEx facility will go from anywhere from 50-120 miles in a day, at least typically. Some go into Tennessee, which definitely adds to the higher end of that portion. Highway or even regular street driving doesn't kill fuel economy (or electric mileage) nearly as badly as constantly stopping and going every... 50-200 feet? Which is definitely something a USPS postal truck is doing comparatively to even a FedEx or UPS delivery van.

Having to constantly dig into the torque range versus being able to consistently (or even somewhat consistently) ride at a steady pace murders any gains in range and overall efficiency. 300 miles is 300 miles, but 300 miles means nothing without context in how a car is driven.

[DeScruff]

44 minutes ago, poochyena said:

This reminds me of the "which is heavier 100 pounds of feathers or 100 pounds of bricks" thing. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uH0hikcwjIA

I always hate that honestly horrible example/riddle since it always gets missused. Yes. Same number.  Completely different *every other* variable, which depending on context, does matter.

And the reason nobody likes your "The length of a state!" example, is it does not give good context. Just like me saying the longest human hair can stretch from New York to Califormia _{if you make it as thin as atomically possible.}  What? its the same mass and atomic makeup as a human hair. Its the same hair Its the same exact thing.

Also just putting this out there: You pulled 300 miles outa your ass. We haven't been told the range on these things. And as PlayStation 2 pointed out, you still need more context, that is why they say "highway" miles or "city miles".
 

[poochyena]

1 hour ago, PlayStation 2 said:

Having to constantly dig into the torque range versus being able to consistently (or even somewhat consistently) ride at a steady pace murders any gains in range and overall efficiency.

source that on that? I was under the impression it doesn't matter much for electric cars.

1 hour ago, DeScruff said:

Completely different *every other* variable, which depending on context, does matter.

There is no other variable or context. The discussion is range and 300 miles is 300 miles. What exactly is it that you think is missing from the discussion?

1 hour ago, DeScruff said:

Also just putting this out there: You pulled 300 miles outa your ass.

300 miles is how far a new tesla car can go, so no, you are wrong about that.

[GDRRiley]

15 minutes ago, poochyena said:

300 miles is how far a new tesla car can go, so no, you are wrong about that.

thing is USPS doesn't need 300 miles. 100-150 with 25% battery capacity reserved is fine

[AlwaysFSX]

2 hours ago, poochyena said:

uhh.. 300 miles is 300 miles.

No, you're wrong.

Accelerating a vehicle from a stop is significantly less efficient than staying at a set speed (say, 50 mph for EPA enjoyment). Guess what a USPS vehicle does? Start. Stop. Start. Stop. Start. Stop.

A lot.

 

At low speeds. Far outside the range of efficiency for running a vehicle. Add in elevation changes like in many, many areas in the country and your stop and go efficiency drops even more. Is it clicking for you why "300 miles" is not just "300 miles?"

This is ignoring the hilarious logistics of modifying USPS vehicle yards to charge all of the vehicles in a timely manner. All of them at once? Huge modification and installation costs to the yards. Only a small section? Enjoy rotating vehicles constantly and hoping everything gets done in time for the runs.

 

I swear, this is why contracts are constantly modified, not thinking about actual issues.

[TempestCatto]

These new trucks are hella ugly. But at least I'll be able to buy an LLV soon. The LLV was an amazing truck tho. Was it a screaming metal death trap? Oh ya, for sure. Underneath that sexy body was just a Chevy S10 without A/C. At least the new trucks will have it (should be illegal not to have it).

[poochyena]

1 hour ago, GDRRiley said:

thing is USPS doesn't need 300 miles. 100-150 with 25% battery capacity reserved is fine

exactly!

48 minutes ago, AlwaysFSX said:

Accelerating a vehicle from a stop is significantly less efficient than staying at a set speed (say, 50 mph for EPA enjoyment). Guess what a USPS vehicle does? Start. Stop. Start. Stop. Start. Stop.

again, source?

[PeachGr]

You can't make everything electric yet. There is not enough lithium batteries, not enough gris to power everything in most of places.

[Brooksie359]

8 hours ago, poochyena said:

>Jeremy Clarkson
Doesn't he have a history of unfairly reviewing electric cars? https://topgear.fandom.com/wiki/Tesla_Roadster_Review_Controversy

duh? Why did you feel the need to point that out?

sorry for taking your serious at first. I'll move on.

Then do it then, when more funding is provided. You either do it right the first time or don't do it at all. Full stop.

well thats a great example right there, if they don't have the cash, then get a loan, that would likely even be cheaper in the long run. This is the government, they can get the money if they wanted.

A loan for billions is not easily obtained. Also its not like the USPS has control over the amount of money the government provides them. That would be congress. 

[Brooksie359]

7 hours ago, DrMacintosh said:

No, I am being serious. At your claimed rate of doing 1 post office per day it would take 31,000 years to do all post offices. I made a generous scenario of 20 post offices per day that brought the number down to just over 4 years, but the reality is doing 10 post offices a day would be incredible and doing them all in a day would be even more incredible. 

As someone who works in the construction industry i would say its not hard to have multiple offices done around the US at the same time. I would find it incredibly weird if it worked like you are talking about at all in terms of timeline. I am unsure how much they would have to change to retrofit charging stations in the existing post offices but I highly doubt we are talking about a couple of days worth of work. I would imagine a couple of weeks worth of work at minimum and then more for inspection and verification. And this is not including the work that has to be done to create the plans for the work in the first place. I think the real pain is that it would likely have to be phased construction or they would have to figure something out to ensure the construction doesn't impact the post office services. All that being said most construction projects take anywhere from a year to 2 years to do from starting plans to finished products. I would imagine they could likely do alot of these at the same time but probably not all so 4 years might not be too far off the actual mark. The is especially the case with government construction projects because they have a whole host of extra special requirements that makes the project take longer generally. 

[AlwaysFSX]

24 minutes ago, poochyena said:

again, source?

Going to make this very, very simple for you. It's high school physics. You ready?

[RejZoR]

2 hours ago, AlwaysFSX said:

No, you're wrong.

Accelerating a vehicle from a stop is significantly less efficient than staying at a set speed (say, 50 mph for EPA enjoyment). Guess what a USPS vehicle does? Start. Stop. Start. Stop. Start. Stop.

A lot.

 

At low speeds. Far outside the range of efficiency for running a vehicle. Add in elevation changes like in many, many areas in the country and your stop and go efficiency drops even more. Is it clicking for you why "300 miles" is not just "300 miles?"

This is ignoring the hilarious logistics of modifying USPS vehicle yards to charge all of the vehicles in a timely manner. All of them at once? Huge modification and installation costs to the yards. Only a small section? Enjoy rotating vehicles constantly and hoping everything gets done in time for the runs.

 

I swear, this is why contracts are constantly modified, not thinking about actual issues.

Not to mention 300 miles in cold becomes 150 miles with EV's. Petrol vehicles have same range regardless of conditions. Refueling? Petrol vehicle can be refueled in 5 minutes with paying included. With EV's, that vehicle will be sitting doing nothing for up to 1 hour on fastest charging stations. 1 hour of doing nothing is wasted 1 hour during which nothing is being delivered. I'm just so sick of everyone instantly throwing "but muh electric motor efficiency". Yeah, what about it? It's more efficient, but you need to drag around 10x more weight whether full or empty. Batteries didn't magically get lighter. You still need half a ton of them bolted on what's essentially regular car. Which usually makes them weight from 1500kg to 2000kg and more (regular hatchback). Everyone is waving this away like it's nothing. Drag around 500kg of cargo with regular car and tell me how that's insignificant.

 

I'm a tech nerd and i like electric cars like any other high tech gadget. But I look at it realistically. Where everyone else seems to look at them through rainbow tinted glasses. It's not all pink unicorns and rainbows. They have serious issues and limitations which makes them nearly useless in a lot of scenarios. Especially for commercial use. And I've seen this too many times like idiots hyping EV airplanes and stuff. Batteries just become unreasonably big and heavy to a point airplane would be mostly batteries with issues even supporting own weight construction wise. And issue always becomes charging. Airplanes already refuel for a very long time. Imagine waiting them to charge with electricity, assuming one could even make one that could even fly.

 

Batteries as we know them today are a terrible power source that needs to get dramatically changed in order to revolutionize mobility. And we'll reach that when we manage to stuff 600 kilometers of range worth in electricity into a 50kg energy storage pack. That's roughly the energy density of a petrol in a relatively modern car (NA inline 4, 1.4L). And that's obtained from an engine that has like 35% efficiency. Just shows the insane energy density of petrol. Now, we can either make engines super more efficient or we make batteries super more efficient. Pick your poison.

[Senzelian]

14 hours ago, GDRRiley said:

I wanted 90-95%

Replacing and recyling those batteries would surely be fun.

 

If you want a clean way to deliver letters, use bicycles. That's how we've been doing it for decades in Germany.

Also it's much more healthy for the workers. And if it rains or snows, go grab a pair of balls and get your sh*t together.

[atxcyclist]

10 hours ago, poochyena said:

lmao, what? Do people in rural areas not have electricity?
They do. Its literally just a one or two day job to add some extra connectors to usps hubs to garage or yards that the trucks are parked at. They'll have 12 hours to charge, they don't need advanced fast charging connectors.

 

That makes no sense. Thats the cheaper option, the more expensive option is to buy a gas truck and then upgrade it later.

You can literally drive from one side of Iowa to the other, 300 miles, on a single charge from tesla model 3

Rural areas don't tend to have the type of electrical service needed to charge a small fleet of electric vehicles. Even if they're low-amperage chargers, you still have to have enough incoming service current to deal with many hundreds of amps of charging alone. It's incredibly easy to live with an electric car in a big metropolitan area, it gets much more difficult once you get out of them.

 

A Model 3 doesn't have to carry 1000lbs of mail and stop-start a hundred times on it's journey across Iowa, so there's that.

[GDRRiley]

36 minutes ago, atxcyclist said:

Rural areas don't tend to have the type of electrical service needed to charge a small fleet of electric vehicles. Even if they're low-amperage chargers, you still have to have enough incoming service current to deal with many hundreds of amps of charging alone. It's incredibly easy to live with an electric car in a big metropolitan area, it gets much more difficult once you get out of them.

do  you even know how much power farming takes?

most ~1000 acre farms have 2-400A of 480V 3phase

 

[atxcyclist]

7 minutes ago, GDRRiley said:

do  you even know how much power farming takes?

most ~1000 acre farms have 2-400A of 480V 3phase

 

I don't know any farmers.

 

My friend is a cattle rancher though with over 2000 acres of property, he has a 300A, 240V panel at his house that serves his garage and his electric well, and the other water wells on his acreage are all wind-driven.

 

 

 

I also find it hilarious that so many people in this thread are complaining about what the USPS does, like they're not a massive logistics company with decades of experience moving things with vehicles. I'm sure they bought the percentages of vehicles they needed, they should know...

[GDRRiley]

8 minutes ago, atxcyclist said:

I also find it hilarious that so many people in this thread are complaining about what the USPS does, like they're not a massive logistics company with decades of experience moving things with vehicles. I'm sure they bought the percentages of vehicles they needed, they should know...

they mentioned they needed more funding to get more of the fleet electric

[atxcyclist]

10 minutes ago, GDRRiley said:

they mentioned they needed more funding to get more of the fleet electric

Probably to cover the cost of infrastructure improvements needed to their locations to charge vehicles. Gasoline still makes sense for many fleet vehicle routes, even putting in and certifying an underground fuel tank and a pump at a rural post office, is much less expensive than running a whole lot of expensive copper for miles to feed charge stations. Not that even the USPS going all electric is a huge load on the system, but as a country we're going to need a lot more high-density power production if we're going to shift a lot more people over to plug-in electric vehicles.

 

As icky as it is to some, nuclear power is probably going to have to be in our future. Solar is OK in some parts of the country, so is wind, but they're weather dependent. Their power density is also really bad in comparison.

[GDRRiley]

2 minutes ago, atxcyclist said:

As icky as it is to some, nuclear power is probably going to have to be in our future. Solar is OK in some parts of the country, so is wind, but they're weather dependent. Their power density is also really bad in comparison.

Nuclear for overnight baseload and then Molten salt or hot oil solar in the desert parts of the country

[atxcyclist]

5 minutes ago, GDRRiley said:

Nuclear for overnight baseload and then Molten salt or hot oil solar in the desert parts of the country

Yeah, the deserts are a perfect spot for big reflector arrays for those.

 

I'm a bit weary of weather-dependent power generation, I'm in Texas and we just had a near complete failure of our electric grid and natural gas production during the storm last week. Authorities are still finding people that froze to death during the storm and probably will be finding them for months. I hope whatever happens in the future either we give up our independent grid, or I am the hell out of this state. If they can just put heaters on the natural gas wells it probably won't happen again, but whether we'll plan to meet a higher EV load or not is yet to be seen.

[pythonmegapixel]

10 hours ago, RejZoR said:

Electric cars are overrated and their ecological benefits are greatly over-exaggerated.

 

Everyone is just "muh torque" and "wow how it accelerates in hyper ludicrous mode" and those same ignore the fact EV's are significantly heavier which means faster deterioration of roads, most of world still gets electricity from coal and gas, battery manufacturing is a rather dirty process of a lot of transportation of materials around the world, a lot of the world isn't sunny California and we have subzero temperatures for a big chunk of the year, charging is still garbage, charging stations and moronic app system is unbelievably retarded compared to gas stations, a lot of people have no means to charge them at home or near home and everyone is praising how batteries can magically be 120% recycled yet we don't know what will happen when entire world runs on batteries and they all suddenly start getting decommissioned after they get used up. And I didn't even touch things like power grid load when everyone is hooking up cars that charge at 50kW or more down to how governments will tax it all. Governments get huge tax money from petrol. Currently everyone is praising low cost of electricity just because governments haven't dropped that sweet petrol tax. Guess what will happen when petrol is sold in small quantities or stopped being sold entirely? You can bet your ass governments will shift petrol tax to electricity tax. You all should damn well know it'll happen. Oh and I didn't even mention the pricing. I know pricing and purchasing power is different in every country, but in mine, EV's are pretty much twice the price of petrol car. You have to be stupid to go into debt for EV or you're loaded enough that you just don't care.

 

All of those factors will improve with time.

 

As for charging at home - installing a home charging station is really cheap compared to the cost of the vehicle, do people not do that? That's not a concern for the post office as they'll be having charging infrastructure installed at the same time as the delivery of the vehicles.

 

I agree with the general sentiment though that EVs are still awful for efficiency. Travel has to switch mostly to walking, cycling or public transport (except for the most rural areas) if it is to remain sustainable. Most of Europe already is on the way there. North America, on the other hand, isn't, and until a majority there realise that they have no fundamental right to drive and providing infrastructure for other modes is not a dangerous communist policy, EVs will remain the least worst option.

 

This isn't really relevant to the postal system, which will still require vehicles no matter what z though

[atxcyclist]

10 minutes ago, pythonmegapixel said:

All of those factors will improve with time.

 

As for charging at home - installing a home charging station is really cheap compared to the cost of the vehicle, do people not do that? That's not a concern for the post office as they'll be having charging infrastructure installed at the same time as the delivery of the vehicles.

 

I agree with the general sentiment though that EVs are still awful for efficiency. Travel has to switch mostly to walking, cycling or public transport (except for the most rural areas) if it is to remain sustainable. Most of Europe already is on the way there. North America, on the other hand, isn't, and until a majority there realise that they have no fundamental right to drive and providing infrastructure for other modes is not a dangerous communist policy, EVs will remain the least worst option.

 

This isn't really relevant to the postal system, which will still require vehicles no matter what z though

The United States is really big, Texas alone is about the size of France, which is by far the biggest country in Western Europe. I've driven, cycled, traveled by bus, and now motorcycle to work, and public transport and walking/cycling are not practical most places here. Austin, Texas where I live is supposed to be a great cycling mecca with an emphasis on commuters, but it's awful for cycle commuting. The great expanses of space between metro areas is what really limits the effectiveness of that type of public transport here, many people just couldn't get to work without a personal vehicle when they commute in from 30+km away.