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The U.S. Postal Service has just submitted its first official order for a batch of over 50,000 controversial next-gen delivery vehicles (NGDV) from manufacturer Oshkosh Defense. While the order went ahead unchanged despite numerous last-minute criticisms levied by President Biden’s administration and the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), at least 20 percent of the first order of USPS NGDVs are slated to be zero-emission battery-electric vehicles.
Earlier this year, the EPA attempted to delay the Postal Service’s completion of a deal with Oshkosh Defense to manufacture a bunch of replacements for the current aging fleet of Grumman LLV mail carrier vehicles. The EPA claimed the Postal Service failed to do a proper analysis of the new vehicle from Oshkosh Defense, which was chosen out of a small group of submissions from various international manufacturers and only offers marginal fuel efficiency improvements over the current fleet. They demanded more fuel-efficient, if not fully-electric vehicles that could deliver more performance than the winning Oshkosh NGDV.