USPS Carriers' New Ride Arrives

The Postal Service's new delivery vehicles aren't going to win a beauty contest. They're tall and ungainly. The windshields are vast. Their hoods resemble a duck bill. Their bumpers are enormous. "You can tell that [the designers] didn't have appearance in mind," postal worker Avis Stonum says. Odd appearance aside, the first handful of Next Generation Delivery Vehicles that rolled onto postal routes in August in Athens, Georgia, are getting rave reviews from letter carriers accustomed to cantankerous older vehicles that lack modern safety features and are prone to breaking down—and even catching fire, per the AP.

Within a few years the fleet will expand to 60,000, most of them electric models, serving as the Postal Service's primary delivery truck from Maine to Hawaii. Once fully deployed, they'll represent one of the most visible signs of the agency's 10-year, $40 billion transformation led by Postmaster General Louis DeJoy, who's also renovating aging facilities, overhauling the processing and transportation network, among other changes. The current postal vehicles—the Grumman Long Life Vehicle, dating to 1987—have made good on their name, outlasting their projected 25-year life span. But they're well overdue for replacement.

Noisy and fuel-inefficient (9mpg), the Grummans are costly to maintain. They're scalding hot in the summer, with only an electric fan to circulate air. Alarmingly, nearly 100 caught fire last year. The new trucks allow even tall carriers to stand up without bonking their heads and walk from front to back to retrieve packages. For safety, they have airbags, 360-degree cameras, blind-spot monitoring, collision sensors, and anti-lock brakes—all of which are missing on the Grummans. They also have a feature that became common in most cars more than six decades ago: air conditioning, key for drivers in areas with scorching summers. "It felt like heaven blowing in my face," Stonum says of her first experience working in an AC-equipped truck. More here. (More US Postal Service stories.)