The Postal Service's new delivery vehicle isn't going to win any beauty contests.
The car is tall and clunky. The windshield is huge. The bonnet resembles a duck's beak. The bumpers are huge.
“You can tell (the designers) didn't have looks in mind,” postal worker Avis Stonham said.
Strange looks aside, the first few next-generation delivery vehicles, which were rolled out on Athens' postal routes in August, have been met with rave reviews from postal workers accustomed to finicky older vehicles that lack modern safety features, are prone to breakdowns and even catch fire.
Within a few years of that initial deployment, the fleet would expand to 60,000 vehicles, most of them electric, serving as the Postal Service's main delivery truck fleet from Maine to Hawaii.
Once fully deployed, they will be one of the most visible signs of a decade-long, $40 billion overhaul of the Postal Service led by Postmaster General Louis DeJoy, who is also upgrading aging facilities, overhauling the processing and transportation network and making other changes.
The current mail fleet, a 1987-built Grumman Long Life Vehicle, has lived up to its name and lasted well beyond its intended 25-year lifespan. But it is long past time for replacement.
The Grumman is noisy, has poor fuel economy (9 mpg), and is expensive to maintain.
Summers are scorching hot and the only way to circulate the air is with an old-fashioned electric fan.
Vehicles are fitted with mirrors that, when perfectly aligned, allow drivers to see around the vehicle, but they are constantly misaligned. Astonishingly, nearly 100 vehicles caught fire last year, putting both couriers and mail at risk.
The new trucks are built by Oshkosh Defense in South Carolina with comfort, safety and practicality in mind.
Even a tall postman can stand up and walk from front to back to retrieve a package without hitting his head.
For safety, it comes with airbags, 360-degree cameras, blind-spot monitoring, crash sensors and anti-lock brakes, all of which are not available on the Grumman.
The new trucks also come equipped with a feature that became common in most vehicles more than 60 years ago: air conditioning.
And that's important for drivers in the Deep South, the desert Southwest and other areas where scorching summers continue.
“It really was like heaven had blown over me,” Stonham said of his first experience working in an air-conditioned truck.
Another driver, Richard Burton, said he appreciated the larger loading space for larger loads and the fact that he didn't have to stand up and squat, which helped prevent back pain, and his older truck was prone to breaking down in heavy traffic, he added.
Brian Renfroe, president of the National Association of Letter Carriers, said his union members are just as enthusiastic about the new vehicles as they were when Grumman marked a quantum leap forward from its traditional fleet of old Jeeps.
He credited DeJoy with bringing a sense of urgency to starting production.
“We're happy we've gotten to the stage where they're starting to get out on the streets,” Renfroe said.
The process got off to a rocky start.
Environmentalists were outraged when DeJoy announced that the first wave of new vehicles would be 90% gasoline-powered.
A lawsuit has been filed against the Post Office, calling on it to further electrify its more than 200,000 vehicles in order to reduce emissions.
“Everybody was in uproar,” DeJoy said.
DeJoy said the problem wasn't that people didn't want electric vehicles, but that the cost of electric vehicles, plus the costs of installing thousands of charging stations and upgrading electric service, made them prohibitively expensive at a time when the department was reporting large quarterly operating deficits.
He met with John Podesta, President Joe Biden's top environmental adviser, to find ways to further increase the number of electric vehicles.
The result was a deal to provide the Postal Service with $3 billion, some of which will be used for electric charging stations.
DeJoy announced in December 2022 that the Postal Service would purchase 106,000 vehicles by 2028, including 60,000 next-generation vehicles (45,000 of which will be electric) and 21,000 other electric vehicles. He has pledged that all new purchases starting in 2026 will be electric.
“With the climate crisis looming on our doorstep, electrifying the U.S. government's largest vehicle fleet would provide the progress we've been waiting for,” said Katherine Garcia of the Sierra Club, which sued the Postal Service before it decided to buy more electric vehicles.
DeJoy said he expects that electric vehicles, reduced tailpipe emissions from optimized mail routes, and other changes will help cut carbon emissions by 40% by 2030. The rerouting will also save money.
The Postal Service's environmental fight came full circle this summer when it was awarded the Presidential Federal Sustainability Award by the White House, marking the end of an “interesting journey,” DeJoy said.
He said the honor demonstrates the agency's ability to tackle complex problems, whether operational, financial, technical, political or public policy.
“It comes from moving forward,” he said. “Keep moving forward.”
