USPS buys nearly 10,000 EVs despite poor performance reports
The US Postal Service (USPS) Wednesday announced the purchase of 9,250 electric vehicles (EVs) and 14,000 charging stations despite poor results from similar programs.
The purchase is part of a larger scheme to deploy 66,000 electric vehicles by 2028 in a program expected to cost nearly $10 billion. New electric vehicles will cost $1.3 billion, charging station will cost an additional $1.7 billion, and $6.6 billion will be spent on purchasing electric heavy-duty trucks and other non-delivery vehicles. Taxpayers are bankrolling the initiative through Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act passed in 2021.
But similar projects have so far been unsuccessful, mainly because EVs perform poorly in extreme weather.
Winter’s cold has been known to affect an electric vehicle’s (EV) driving range between 20%-41%, reports Axios. According to University of Michigan’s Energy Institute Director Anna Stefanopoulou, EVs “prefer the same sort of temperature range that people do. Anything below 40 or above 115 degrees Fahrenheit and they’re not going to deliver their peak performance.”
That’s why New York City’s Department of Sanitation is struggling with its initiative to change over its entire fleet of 6,000 garbage trucks from diesel-power to electric. The city’s current rear-loader trucks are equipped with plows that allow the trucks to collect garbage even during the heavy snowstorms that often beleaguer the city.
But the city has found that the electric trucks — each coming with a $523,000 price tag — can only plow for four hours before running out of battery, according to Auto Evolution. With approximately 19,000 miles of road requiring plowing every winter, this might mean some communities will have to manually clear their own roads.
"We found that they could not plow the snow effectively — they basically conked out after four hours,” said Sanitation Commissioner Jessica Tisch. “We need them to go 12 hours." She added, "Given the current state of the technology, I don't see today a path forward to fully electrifying the rear loader portion of the fleet by 2040. We can't really make significant progress in converting our rear loader fleet until the snow challenges are addressed."
