Ford E-Transit vehicles will be used by the U.S. Postal Service (USPS) for future sustainable mail delivery, the agency announced.
The USPS awarded contracts for 9,250 new left-hand drive EVs and more than 14,000 charging stations to be built and installed at facilities across the U.S.
The USPS considered a variety of different EVs, but it ultimately awarded the contract to purchase all 9,250 mail delivery EVs from Ford, opting for its E-Transit van, one of the dominant small commercial vehicles in the sector.
Ford’s E-Transit will join the USPS fleet in December, dependent on a successful Supplemental Environmental Impact Statement.
The use of E-Transit vehicles is just the next step in the USPS plan to revolutionize its vehicle fleet and make it more sustainable. In December, it announced over the next five years, 75% of newly acquired Next Generation Delivery Vehicles will be electric. After 2026, 100% of the NGDVs purchased will be fully electric.
By 2028, the USPS expects to have 66,230 fully electric vehicles, and it plans to purchase a total of 106,000 delivery vehicles in total by that time.
As far as the charging infrastructure, it will be a slow rollout, starting with installations at a minimum of 75 locations over the next year. Additional facilities will be equipped with EV charging infrastructure in the succeeding years, the USPS said.
The USPS has said in the past it will install “tens of thousands” of EV charging stations across the U.S. by 2028.
“We are moving forward with our plans to simultaneously improve our service, reduce our cost, grow our revenue and improve the working environment for our employees. Electrification of our vehicle fleet is now an important component of these initiatives,” said Louis DeJoy, postmaster general. “We have developed a strategy that mitigates both cost and risk of deployment---which enables execution on this initiative to begin now.”
The USPS is investing at least $9.6 billion to update its vehicle fleet, $3 billion of which is from funds made available through the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA). Many of its current vehicles are outdated and offer relatively no modern features that could make mail carriers more comfortable during their shifts.
