While a human skill-set tends to boast many valuable elements, nothing there can claim to be more valuable than our tendency of growing on a consistent basis. You see, when a person can get better each and every situation, they set themselves up to hit upon some huge milestones along the way. This pattern is wholly evident in whatever we have achieved so far, with one notable piece of representation coming from a creation called technology. Technology’s emergence will, in fact, go down as one of the most important moments in our history, considering it guided us towards a reality that we had never even imagined before. Talk about how the new reality helped us, it made us significantly smarter and more complete, therefore preparing us to achieve even more as we move forward. Interestingly enough, going by USPS’ latest move, this very pattern now looks set for another big scale up.
According to a report from Electrek, the United States Postal Service has created a new proposal, which increases the percentage of electric vehicles in its overall fleet. Under the latest arrangement, the service will make sure that at least 50 percent of its initial order for 50,000 next-generation mail trucks will be battery electric vehicles, showing a massive bump from the 10 percent it promised back in February. This pivot on USPS’ part comes after 16 states banded together with environmental activists to sue the service in hopes of blocking its plans to make most of the fleet gas-powered. Now, while the rejuvenated fleet will still have around 14,500 gas-powered vehicles, the service will compensate for them by buying another 34,500 “commercial off-the-shelf” vehicles, with electric iteration making most of that number. The estimations, from an overall standpoint, are that around 40 percent of the total 84,500 purpose-built mail trucks and off-the-shelf vehicles will be electric.
Beyond the new additions, USPS said it will “also need to make significant investment in the repair of over 50,000 aging delivery vehicles each year to continue extending their useful life, despite the significant operational risk, considerable maintenance costs, and the higher emissions of greenhouse gases.”
Even though the plan might sound encouraging to an environmentalist, the whole thing will notably take a long time to fully materialize, as it will be divided into several portions that are going to come together over the next few years. When quizzed about the approach, USPS said that it “anticipates evaluating and procuring smaller quantities of vehicles over shorter time periods…in order to be more responsive to our evolving operational strategy, technology improvements, and changing market conditions,”