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from the maybe-they'll-be-less-surly dept.
USPS picks Oshkosh Defense for future electric mail trucks:
The United States Postal Service has made a selection for its future mail trucks -- and they're going electric. On Tuesday, Oshkosh Defense announced the USPS has selected the Wisconsin-based military vehicle manufacturer to build the Next Generation Delivery Vehicle, or NGDV. The USPS awarded the company a 10-year, $482 million contract to make the new mail trucks.
Not only will Oshkosh help the USPS go electric with battery-electric mail carrier trucks, but it also plans to include "fuel-efficient low-emission internal combustion engine vehicles" as part of the contract. It's unclear what purpose these will serve, however, especially noting President Joe Biden's pledge to move the federal fleet to 100% electric vehicles. Oshkosh did not immediately return a request for comment.
The AP stated that
The postal service last updated its mail-delivery trucks 30 years ago, and there have been major changes in the service's operations since then. Traditional mail volumes have declined, while the service now delivers millions of packages from online retailers like Amazon that did not exist when the previous mail vehicle was introduced.
and that an all-electric proposal lost out:
The choice of Wisconsin-based Oshkosh is a big miss for Ohio-based electric vehicle startup Workhorse Group, which put in an all-electric bid for the vehicles. Shares of Workhorse fell more than 47% Tuesday.
On the plus side, according to Car and Driver
They will also have air conditioning and airbags—both of which the current trucks lack—as well as heat, a 360-degree camera, a front and rear collision avoidance system, and automated emergency braking.
On the other hand, Morgan Sung's article at Mashable is titled "The multi-billion dollar USPS modernization looks like...a duck", so there's that I guess
Additional coverage at vice, Trucks.com
Press Release:
U.S. Postal Service Awards Contract to Launch Multi-Billion-Dollar Modernization of Postal Delivery Vehicle Fleet
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday February 24 2021, @05:22PM (1 child)
So government owned, government operated vehicles rolling up and down every street in America every day with 360 degree cameras mounted to them.
Is there any reason to believe they're not tied to a cloud server and stored indefinitely?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday February 24 2021, @07:12PM
May be too much data to store. Better to process them first.