MSNBC STAFF AND WIRE REPORTS
MSNBC’s Miguel Llanos and The Associated Press and Reuters contributed to this report.
December 23, 1999
“WE DELIVER clean air along with the nation’s mail ... that’s our holiday gift to the nation,” Postmaster General William Henderson said as the agency announced the contract with Ford Motor Company.
The post office will buy 500 new right-hand drive vehicles based on the Ford Ranger pickup for about $12 million. The vehicles will be built on the chassis of Ford’s electric Ranger pickup but will have the traditional Postal Service delivery shell on top.
The first ones should be delivered next fall and the Postal Service has the option to order a total of 6,000 vehicles.
The Postal Service has about 200,000 vehicles in its fleet nationwide, but only 25 are electric, known in the industry as
EVs.
FEDERAL EV FLEET TO DOUBLE
T.J. Glauthier, an assistant secretary at the Energy Department, said only about 500 EVs are now being used in the entire U.S. government. “This doubles the number of electric vehicles in use in the whole federal government in one swoop,” Glauthier said.
The bulk of the electric postal vehicles — 420 — will be used for mail delivery in Southern California, with 60 going to Northern California and 20 to the Washington, D.C., area.
Electric chargers are typically placed in fleet or public garages, and plug into a vehicle.Thanks to a combination of state and federal subsidies, the Ranger EVs, normally priced at $39,000, will cost the Postal Service only $23,000 apiece.
New York is offering Ford business incentives because the vehicles’ body will be connected to its Ranger chassis at an existing Ford plant in Rome, N.Y.
And the state of California and the Energy Department are offering the Postal Service special subsidies for using electric, rather than standard emission, vehicles.
SOME PROS
The Postal Service and electric vehicle advocates cite several advantages over standard cars:
EVs are virtually pollution free, and the the 500 electric delivery vehicles are expected to annually reduce tailpipe emissions by nearly 143,000 pounds of carbon monoxide, 11,000 pounds of hydrocarbons, and 16,000 pounds of nitrogen oxides.
EVs reduce dependency on oil imports.
EVs are generally quieter and easier to handle than their standard emission cousins. Plus, they accelerate similar to gasoline-powered counterparts.
SOME CONS
There are drawbacks, however, among them:
While EVs are nearly pollution free, often the electricity they use comes from power plants that use coal, itself a pollutant. Still, as more plants become cleaner and turn to natural gas, those emissions will come down.
A bigger drawback, at least in consumers’ eyes, is that EVs travel just 50 miles or so before they need a recharge. On top of that, public charging stations are not common outside of California.
That explains why only 1,000 Ranger EVs, the most popular electric vehicle, are on North American roads.
Still, that drawback hasn’t been significant to fleet buyers like the Postal Service, which sees EVs as ideal for the short and regular routes its trucks take.
OTHER ENERGY SOURCES
The Postal Service has been experimenting with other alternatives as well. It recently purchased about 21,000 vehicles that can run on gasoline or ethanol. Because of California state environmental laws, the Postal Service already uses the relatively clean-burning ethanol fuel in its vehicles there.
And it already has the nation’s largest delivery fleet — 7,500 — that runs on compressed natural gas, which is much cleaner than unleaded or diesel.