Oshkosh won the award in February, which could ultimately be worth some $6 billion. And while it says some of the mail trucks it builds may be electric when they hit the road in 2023, neither the company nor the USPS has offered concrete details about how many — or how a defense contractor with no history of making EVs plans to provide them to the largest federal fleet. It took Postmaster General Louis DeJoy getting dragged in front of Congress just to get his estimate that the fleet could be around 10 percent EVs. And even then, he said his agency would need billions more dollars to push that number any higher.
Some members of Congress are willing to do just that provided they get assurances that the mix of EVs is high. But even if DeJoy gets that money, it’s still not clear what exactly can be done, as the whole process played out behind a thick veil of secrecy. (Even email correspondence obtained via the Freedom of Information Act by The Verge between the remaining bidders and the USPS across 2020 was almost entirely redacted.) The contract with Oshkosh is currently stuck behind that veil, too, meaning everyone outside the defense contractor and the USPS has been playing a guessing game as to what it entails.