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USPS' long-awaited new mail truck makes its debut to rave reviews from carriers (apnews.com)

submitted 1 month ago by MyOpinion@lemm.ee to c/evs@lemmy.world

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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.

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[+] NoIWontPickAName@kbin.earth -39 points 1 month ago (3 children)

From what I’ve seen he is doing a lot of good.

[–] Addv4@lemmy.world 25 points 1 month ago

He tried to get them to mainly use gas powered hybrid ones. Which sounds great on the surface, but they basically got the same mpg as the now at least 30 year old LLVs they were replacing, just with AC. When that fact was put out, these fully electric ones genuinely just made way more sense for most postal routes. They took a long time to develop, but that's because the usps had a long list of stuff they wanted to accommodate (sounds crazy, but they seem to have actually taken a lot of feedback from the drivers).

He also got rid of a lot of the automated letter sorting, most likely to slow mail-in voting. A lot of those sorter couldn't easily be replaced, as they were expensive machines.

[–] Aphelion@lemm.ee 19 points 1 month ago

No, he's made forced concessions to the Biden administration, but it's only to placate them enough to keep his position, and double dip with contracts for XPO (the business he used to own and still has financial ties with).

[–] NoIWontPickAName@kbin.earth 2 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Damn people are mad.

Y’all I don’t have some super in-depth view of the postal service.

I just know they’re paying like ~$22+ an hour to be a rural route driver here.

That’s damn good money for here, and maybe federal health and retirement benefits.

I’m not sure if you’re usps or a contractor and how that would all fall out.

Hell they don’t even get the new cars the article is about, they have to use their own.

~$22.00 an hour to sit in your car and deliver mail is an excellent wage even accounting for wear and tear plus no benefits.

Maybe not everywhere, but I make the same plus benefits for filling trailers with boxes in the heat and cold, and I live a pretty decent life, bought a house, and am saving for retirement plus paying off old debts.

Plus it’s pretty around here, especially on the gravel roads.

[–] Addv4@lemmy.world 1 points 1 month ago

The main reason you seem to have been down voted soo much is because you said that Dejoy was the cause of the recent improvements in the postal system. While he was over the USPS during the changes, it's pretty obvious that he's not the reason for them. $22hr is decent, but it really does depend on where you live, and they do have deliver a lot of packages, so it's not an amazingly cushy job (I think a UPS driver is paid like ~$30hr in my area, although you could argue they are moving more packages on avg).