Electric van manufacturer Canoo announced a highly visible deal with the United States Postal Service (USPS), which will see the USPS acquire a handful of right-hand drive versions of the company’s LDV 190 delivery van.
Canoo announced that the USPS will purchase six (6) battery-electric Canoo vehicles. In its official press release, the company said that it was “honored” to participate in the post office’s evaluation of potential suppliers as the USPS moves towards the “groundbreaking electrification and modernization” of its national delivery fleet.
Wait—is this really an article about the purchase of 6 vans? Six.
While I’d prefer more like 10 or 20, when they are doing a trial, people tend to get upset if the government spends more than they think is appropriate. If these work as well as the company claims they do, they’ll buy more, for the next hundred years if history is any indication.
They have every right to be upset when you consider that the government already paid $500 million to defense contractor Oshkosh Defense to build new electrified/ICE USPS vans 3 years ago. These were supposed to be on the road last year but surprise surprise, they aren’t. I’m sure the government payments are still clearing though.
https://www.businessinsider.com/post-office-new-electric-mail-truck-oshkosh-contract-2021-2
I swear people have the memory of goldfish when it comes to stuff like this and then wonder why the state of things is so terrible in the US.
Didn’t they just upgrade a bunch of USPS with Mercedes made ICE vans too?
Edit: those are apparently stopgap vehicles to get them through until their able to adopt whatever new standard the settle on.
Knowing Canoo, six is all they can come up with for the test. I like their smaller van, and even have some money invested in them, but they’re not looking like a real company at this point, they’re years behind on production, not transparent at all about how many vehicles they’ve made, but they love to announce the deals they’ve made with WalMart, NASA, USPS, OK and more. This van is actually one of their newer designs, I think they created it on request by WalMart.
It’s an article about a new pilot program that may lead to sweeping changes
I realize others have kinda alluded to it, but you don’t go all in on an untested product.
Imagine if they bought 10k of them, deployed them across the country, scrapped all of the current vehicles, only to find out that they have a fatal flaw, or explode, or [insert thing here].
They won’t get the same density of data with six, and I admit a dozen or two would be better, but this is going to allow them to gather good data and give good feedback on what needs to change before they go all in.
Edit: I forgot to mention, they may not even move forward with these.