What will be the mail truck of the future? - The Washington Post
Quote:
And now, it turns out, one of the largest vehicle fleets in the country has reached the end of its useful life. The question is what will come next.
The answer isn’t as easy as it might seem. The delivery and collection fleet of 190,000 postal trucks includes 142,000 vehicles that desperately need to enter retirement, with an average age of 24 years and some as advanced as 27. The first Grumman Long Life Vehicle, as they’re called, rolled off the assembly line in 1987.
Maintenance costs on the trucks increase every year–and hit almost $1 billion in 2012 –and replacement parts for older models are scarce. The trucks are not up to today’s safety codes. They get terrible gas mileage. The USPS Inspector General’s office said in an audit this summer that the agency can keep them safely in use only until fiscal 2017.
But replacing the fleet would cost postal officials about $5 billion, and that’s a check that at the moment they can’t write. The financially struggling mail agency has exceeded its legal borrowing limit and doesn’t have the cash for such an expensive, if critical, investment.
The Postal Service has come up with a possible solution: Find a company that can retrofit the existing light-duty trucks by keeping their aluminum bodies and replacing the frames.
“The bodies are still in really good shape,” said Sue Brennan, a USPS spokeswoman.
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IOW, do what the street rodders do.
It has a nice front-end for aerodynamics. If I had one of those, like for an EV conversion, I would totally bare metal the body and give it swirly marks with an angle grinder.