Exclusive: Trump may cancel US Postal Service electric mail truck contract, sources say
Exclusive: Trump may cancel US Postal Service electric mail truck contract, sources say
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Postal service plans to spend billions on EV chargers and roughly 66,000 new trucks Contract cancellation likely part of sweeping executive order on EVsTrump transition weighs plan to cancel USPS contracts to build large EV fleet
Dec 6 (Reuters) - Donald Trump's transition team is considering canceling the U.S. Postal Service's contracts to electrify its delivery fleet, as part of a broader suite of executive orders targeting electric vehicles, according to three sources familiar with the plans.
The move, which could be unveiled in the early days of Trump’s administration that begins on Jan. 20, is in line with Trump's campaign promises to roll back President Joe Biden’s efforts to decarbonize U.S. transportation to fight climate change – an agenda Trump has said is unnecessary and potentially damaging to the economy.
Reuters has previously reported that Trump is planning to kill a $7,500 consumer tax credit for electric vehicle purchases, and plans to roll back Biden's stricter fuel-efficiency standards.
The sources told Reuters that Trump’s transition team is now reviewing how it can unwind the postal service's multibillion-dollar contracts, including with Oshkosh (OSK.N), and Ford (F.N) for tens of thousands of battery-driven delivery trucks and charging stations.
Oshkosh shares fell by roughly 5% to 105.65 per share after the Reuters report.
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Hey look! Let's just raise a huge middle finger to what's left of our ecosystems.
How did it go? Yes, humanity was destroyed, but for one moment we maximized profits!
Not to mention that carriers love the new trucks.
Because they're heated and actually safe to drive and don't break down every two months like the old mail vehicles.
Current LLVs are heated, they don't have AC.
They'll still get the gas powered ones. Pretty much have to; those old mail trucks are far past their expiration date.
You’re assuming trump intends to keep the USPS. He wants to destroy/privatise it. He said so all the way back in 2021, but at the time, didn’t have a mandate to actually accomplish it.
His cronies stand to make billions if the USPS is dismantled and all mail and shipping can go through their companies instead.
At this point, it's not really about maximizing profits, it's about trying to undo every change Biden made
At this point, it’s not really about maximizing profits, it’s about trying to undo every change Biden made
Its even worse. The new truck was likely by Dejoy, Trump's own appointee.
What do you mean?
Trump appointed DeJoy in 2020 to the position as Postmaster General.
OK. I am still having trouble parsing
The new truck was by Dejoy
What does that mean?
Trump chose Dejoy to lead the Post Office. Dejoy is head of the Post Office. The Post Office chose this new EV truck. Therefore the new EV truck is a product of Trump's choice. Now Trump is trying to kill his (by proxy) chosen EV truck.
Ah gotcha. I don't think Dejoy is a green advocate or anything. Congress gave the postal service 3B dollars to invest in electric vehicles, and that's what they started doing. They are cheaper if you amortize costs over a decade.
Absolutely. And Trump put the man in charge, and is now saying he's doing wrong.
Trump's is Putin's puppet. He's set to destroy whatever he can.
The way he talked about Putin making Obama look dumb... he thinks that when you act like an asshole and tear down what someone built that it makes the other person look bad.
That's cause he's a bully. He's only ever brought people down to bring himself up. He thinks this is the same thing.
Trump doesn't care. He's going to be dead in a few years and as far as he's concerned, the entire universe could instantly implode afterward.
In fact, he probably thinks the universe ends when his finite energy battery that keeps his fat ass from exercising gives out.
Those trucks get like six miles to the gallon, they're a massive liability on American finances. If the average price of gas changes by a cent that's something like nearly a million dollars difference. This isn't maximizing profit, this is just being petty to own the libs.
In case anyone wants to do math, it's actual MPG is a 17 combination. In real world settings it gets 8 - 10 MPG. From recent hearing EV USPS truck costs 20k more than ICE variant. The new Oshkosh vehicle uses 1.5kWh supposedly.
If anyone was curious the new replacement ICE variant should get 8.5 to 10.5 MPG.
Grumman absolutely knocked it out of the park with that LLV design for it being 4 decades ago.
There it is!
But why not phase out with capital expense of new electric vehicles as they depreciate? I'm pro environment to the point of spending years running to work, also a postal worker, and DeJoy is basically running shit into the ground by blowing cash on capital equipment like he has some sort of magic credit card.
This also really fucks with enterprise value and makes the USPS more 'juicy' in regard to being privatized. Sitting on oodles of new shiny gear with an atrocious balance sheet, piggy bank primed to be smashed to pieces.
But environmentally speaking, we just got a fuckload of Metris and scrapping all that shit for the sake of buying new shit is peak consumerism. Cram the landfills
Edit: I cannot stress that last bit enough, in the past couple year we already revamped our fleet as drastically as the EV contract would be. So fucking stupid. Maybe give it 10 years? Mail volume is so high we had to but it's good servicable stuff, may as well use it and let it all depreciate rather than buy EV for the sake of the environment and scrap a bunch of new vans at the detriment to the environment and the USPS' solvency
I think you're under some misconceptions about how this has happened. The old trucks are completely non-viable. Way past their expected lifespan. They all need to go. If there was a time to phase out the old trucks, it was about 20 years ago.
The new trucks come in EV and gas flavors. The EV version only has a 70 mile range, but that's plenty for many city/suburban routes. So they're putting them in where they make sense and everything else gets the gas version. Over time, a longer range EV version could take over the vast majority of routes, if not all of them.
I'm in Minneapolis and we got 130 new Metris vans last year. Like, the actual 55401 P&DC, not including all the city stations that also got new Metris vans. There's your area where EVs make sense. No misconception here.
Edit: and RCAs will use their own vehicles per the contract so even in the places where shoving these things off to make room for EVs for city routes would make sense, not possible
They got those because the Gremlins are falling apart. They're not likely to be scrapped. They're probably going to be sold at auction a few years from now.
USPS doesn't like selling the old Gremlins at auction because they're sensitive about anyone impersonating a mail carrier (though a few have slipped through into private hands). Nobody else operates them, so any Gremlin looks like a mail carrier. A Metris, though, is just another van, and a quick paint job to remove the USPS logos is all they need.
Before Metris we had Dodges that were similar, before the Dodges we had minivans. But the Dodges, they weren't banged up too much before being replaced, probably 2019-ish? The whole Metris thing was even dumb, coming from a really big station/processing center. Maybe Minneapolis is an outlier but we've been going through equipment like nothing