New USPS electric vans delayed until mid-2024, according to court docs

The United States Postal Service's attempt to replace its aging fleet of delivery vans with a more efficient model is going to take longer than anticipated. Originally, the USPS was to accept the first of its new Next Generation Delivery Vehicles by December of this year. But that has been pushed back until June 2024 at the earliest, according to court documents.

An unambitious plan

The quest to replace the US Postal Service's aging and increasingly dangerous Grumman LLVs began in 2015. After several years of evaluation, in 2021 the USPS announced it had arrived at a winner--a rather odd-looking van with something of a duckbill, designed by defense contractor Oshkosh. The USPS said it wanted to order between 50,000-165,000 NGDVs over a 10-year period, with an initial contract of $485 million.

Enthusiasm over the announcement was rapidly tempered, however. The NGDV has been designed to be powertrain-agnostic and can be fitted either with electric motors and a lithium-ion battery or an internal combustion engine. And it rapidly became clear that only a small minority of NGDVs--10 percent in fact--would be battery-electric vehicles.

Insult was added to injury the following year when it emerged that the internal combustion engine version of the NGDV was barely any more efficient than the current vehicle unless it was operated without the climate control system. (Having an effective climate control system was one of the requirements of the new van, and a failing of the current LLV.)

The White House Council on Environmental Quality and the Environmental Protection Agency were both highly critical of the USPS's decision. The "Postal Service chose not to consider in detail even a single feasible alternative to its proposal that would be more environmentally protective, evaluating only alternatives the Postal Service itself considered to be infeasible (e.g., 100 percent BEVs given longer rural routes)," wrote the EPA, with the chair of the CEQ telling Postmaster Louis DeJoy that his "agency committed to walk down a path before looking to see where the path was leading."

Let the lawsuits begin

In April 2022, 16 states and several environmental groups took the USPS to court in California for failing to follow processes mandated by the National Environmental Policy Act. The lawsuit alleged that the award to Oshkosh was a fait accompli, which took place long before completing the required environmental impact reports. Other lawsuits followed in both California and New York.

The USPS repeatedly pointed to the state of its finances when questioned on its lack of ambition to meet federal goals for an all-EV fleet by 2027.

By the end of last year, the USPS delivery replacement plan was revised again. Now the USPS was committing to 60,000 NGDVs from Oshkosh by 2028, and 45,000 of those would be BEVs. Additionally, the USPS would buy 21,000 commercial off-the-shelf EVs by 2028, with a promise that any new vehicle bought by the postal service from 2026 onward would be fully electric.

The first deliveries were scheduled to happen later this year, possibly as early as October. Now that won't happen until at least next June, according to an update filed by the USPS's attorneys.

The additional environmental impact reports are going to be late arriving as well. A draft was supposed to be ready this month, allowing the postal service to publish a final report on its purchasing decision in August. Now the draft report should be ready for public comment by the end of June, with a final document published in October.

To make up for the late delivery, the USPS announced in February it was buying 9,250 Ford E-Transit vans and would be ordering 14,000 EVSE level 2 charging stations in order to start building an inventory. However, the first of those E-Transits won't arrive until the end of this year. The postal service also said that it would build out charging infrastructure in at least 75 post offices within 12 months.