by The USPS will purchase 9,250 Ford E-Transit EVs by the end of this year as the agency embarks on the electrification of the largest federal fleet in the US. Delivery of the E-Transit EV mail trucks will begin in December 2023, and the Ford EVs will be one of the first major milestones in the USPS’s effort to move away from ICE-equipped delivery vans.
It is therefore strange that the USPS also buys an equal number of mail trucks from Stellantis: namely 9,250 Ram ProMaster vans that run on gasoline not electricity. If Reuters reports, this first batch of EVs from Ford will make up the postal service’s burgeoning fleet of Next Generation Delivery Vehicles (NGDV), but due to an “urgent need for vehicles,” the USPS is not stopping purchases of new gas-powered trucks.
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It seems that change isn’t going to happen overnight after all, so the USPS is bolstering its fleet of next-generation Ford E-Transit EVs with a 1:1 ratio of Ram ProMasters — for now. The order for all 18,500 new vans will cost the USPS just over $1 billion, according to USPS Reuters. The idea is that in the meantime, between now and 2026, ICE-equipped postal vehicles will still be needed, after which all new NGDV models will be 100 percent electric
The independent agency is also investing an additional $260 million to purchase 14,000 charging stations from Blink Charging, Siemens and Rexel USA. These will be installed in at least 75 US cities within the next 12 months.
Funnily enough, there will be more charging stations than the Ford EVs – made in Kansas City, Missouri – but this is all part of a long-term plan to build out the infrastructure needed to transition to an all-electric fleet. According to the USPS, the NGDV fleet will have a total of 66,230 electric vans by 2028, plus an additional 39,770 gas-powered vehicles. By then there will in any case be more EVs than ICEs among the well-known red-white-blue vans.
This is just the first wave of commercially available EVs the USPS plans to buy from US automakers; there are 11,750 EVs left to meet the 21,000 commercial EVs the USPS plans to purchase as part of its strategy to go all-electric. The post is also awaiting delivery of its other NGDV models, which are pending contract from Oshkosh Defense.
Slowly but surely, the USPS will electrify its fleet. The lengthy process is expected to cost $9.6 billion over the next five years. And nearly a third of that money will come from the Inflation Reduction Act, which will award the USPS $3 billion to move to electric cars.
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