Surprise: UPS EV Fleet Way Behind Schedule

Color me shocked

Huh. Weird. From the link

The US Postal Service has spent more than $3 billion in tax dollars on a brand-new all-electric fleet of mail trucks — and gotten just 612 vehicles for its money, according to a letter sent to Sen. Joni Ernst (R-Iowa) and obtained by The Post.

Former President Joe Biden’s 2022 Inflation Reduction Act set aside billions for what Ernst has since ripped as a green “boondoggle” that saw almost all of that amount paid to Wisconsin-based defense contractor Oshkosh to design and build 35,000 new environmentally friendly mail trucks.

But as of Nov. 10, only 612 of the battery-electric powered vehicles are on the road.

A separate group of electric delivery vehicles — Ford E-Transit vans — are more widely in operation, with 2,010 delivering mail and packages. However, more than 6,700 have been delivered and are just sitting idle — in part because they can’t drive all the routes that the specially designed Oshkosh vehicles can

“Instead of spending another billion dollars on an EV fleet that’s lost in the mail, it’s time to pull the plug on this boondoggle and return the money to sender — the taxpayers,” Ernst said.

How much of the money went up in flames for graft and waste? Ernst should require an audit on what has been spent so far.

Ernst, who chairs the Senate’s DOGE caucus, pronounced the taxpayer spending “a tremendous waste” in a statement after learning about the electric fleet’s poor progress from Peter Pastre, vice president of government relations and public policy at USPS, in the Nov. 17 letter.

Pastre and another USPS rep stressed that thousands more electric vehicles are being produced with IRA funds — though the 9,000 or so rolling off the lots in the three years since Biden’s signature climate law passed hasn’t inspired confidence in congressional Republicans like Ernst who want to rescind the funds.

In the four months since Ernst first inquired in July about the pace of mail trucks being produced, OshKosh has produced 362 trucks in a little more than 100 days, working out to a rate of between three and four trucks per day.

I wonder if the mailmen actually want them, especially ones that are more rural. Because I know many in Raleigh who do not want them. With the miles  put on them, how long till they are having to be put in the dump?