Quote:
Originally Posted by SRR
All that stop and go will be hard on the battery. The USPS is so deep in a financial hole now where will the money come from for that?  |
Electric vehicles use regenerative braking, which helps put a charge back in the battery pack any time the vehicle slows down. It also saves a lot of wear and tear on the actual wheel brakes, which in normal driving conditions are hardly used. When you have a large fleet of vehicles like the USPS does, maintenance is a huge expense (and besides just the brakes, electric vehicles generally have much lower maintenance costs overall.)
Also, remember that the USPS has always had to replace trucks as they wear out and are taken out of service, so gradually changing some of their fleet over to electric won't be that big a deal if and when it happens.
Electric power can work fine for commercial vehicles in cities that run a standard route that's the same length every day and then return to a central facility where they can be recharged - mail trucks, delivery vans, city buses, etc. As an example, Minneapolis has had a few electric buses in service for a couple years now, and as far as I know they work quite well. Other cities are using them, too. (And one big thing as far as I'm concerned is they reduce noise pollution, which is always a problem in cities. On summer nights when I have my bedroom window open and I'm trying to get to sleep, I can sure tell the difference between when a loud diesel bus or a nearly silent electric bus passes by.)
I agree that electric power may not be the best choice yet for a mail truck on a rural mail route that is much longer and may vary from day to day, but as the technology improves and range is increased it will probably happen at some point.