The U.S. Postal Service pledged Wednesday to electrify at least 40 percent of its new delivery fleet, an increase that climate activists hailed as a major step toward reducing the government’s environmental footprint.
The Postal Service had been set to purchase as many as 165,000 vehicles from Oshkosh Defense, of which 10 percent would have been electric under the original procurement plan. Now it will acquire 50,000 trucks from Oshkosh, half of which will be EVs. It will also buy another 34,500 commercially available vehicles, with sufficient electric models to make 4 in 10 trucks in its delivery fleet zero-emission vehicles.
Government regulators and environmental activists took issue with the number of gas-powered trucks in the original purchase plan. Oshkosh’s internal-combustion-engine model gets 8.6 mpg with the air conditioning running. That’s less than 0.5 mpg of fuel efficiency better than the decades-old trucks they’re poised to replace.Regulators estimated that 150,000 of the Oshkosh gas-powered trucks would emit roughly the same amount of Earth-warming carbon dioxide each year as 4.
“Electric vehicles are the future of the automotive industry and that is why I have been pressing the Postal Service to purchase more of them as they continue to add more Next Generation Delivery Vehicles and other vehicles to their fleet,” said Sen. Gary Peters , who chairs the Senate committee charged with handling postal issues.Agency leaders and even some of DeJoy’s advisers have for months pushed the postal chief to move the agency away from the Oshkosh deal.
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