The Postal Service’s new delivery vehicles aren’t going to win a beauty contest. They’re tall and ungainly. The windshields are vast. Their hoods resemble a duck bill. Their bumpers are enormous.
“You can tell that (the designers) didn’t have appearance in mind,” postal worker Avis Stonum said.
Odd appearance aside, the first handful of Next Generation Delivery Vehicles that rolled onto postal routes in August in Athens are getting rave reviews from letter carriers accustomed to cantankerous older vehicles that lack modern safety features and are prone to breaking down — and even catching fire.
Within a few years of the initial rollout, the fleet will have expanded to 60,000, most of them electric models, serving as the Postal Service’s primary delivery truck from Maine to Hawaii.
Once fully deployed, they’ll represent one of the most visible signs of the agency’s 10-year, $40 billion transformation led by Postmaster General Louis DeJoy, who’s also renovating aging facilities, overhauling the processing and transportation network, and instituting other changes.
The electric Canoo models look a million times better.
These gas ones are what you get when a defense contractor gets to build highway vehicles. I’m pretty sure these things are well into the 6 figures per vehicle which seems pretty excessive for what it is.
The current LLVs are made by Grumman and the new ones are made by OshKosh, so defense contractors have been building the postal delivery trucks for the last 40 years.
Defense contractors specialize in reading and meeting bid spec and not a millimeter more.
