"The Postal Service Electric Truck: A Comedy in Two Acts" is not the name of an off-broadway musical. But if someone writes it, I want royalties.
The story is a familiar one when discussing the efficacy (or lack thereof) of EVs. Joe Biden, bless his departing soul, thought that the United States Postal Service should set an example for Americans by using electric trucks to move the mail around. He and the Democrats stuffed $3 billion into the farcically misnamed Inflation Reduction Act as a down payment to force the postal service to purchase 60,000 electric postal trucks at an eventual cost of $10 billion.
What happened next was worthy of Buster Keaton or the Keystone Kops.
Defense contractor Oshkosh got the contract and not only proceeded to screw it up but also kept the bad news from the Postal Service brass for more than a year.
There were what was euphemistically described as "manufacturing problems."
Among the problems: Engineers have struggled to calibrate the vehicles’ air bags, according to two people familiar with the manufacturing process. When workers ran leak tests on the vehicles’ bodies and internal components, water poured out as if their oversize windows had been left open in a storm, three people said.
Currently, Oshkosh can produce just one truck per day at its South Carolina factory, according to internal company records and five people with knowledge of the production process. Company records, including emails among executives and internal progress reports, show Oshkosh planned to be manufacturing more than 80 vehicles per day by now.
"A senior company executive tried to alert the mail agency to the problems in 2022 but was blocked by superiors," according to four sources who spoke to the Post.
“This is the bottom line: We don’t know how to make a damn truck,” said one person involved in production.
That's $10 billion to a company that can't make EV trucks. Please, Elon and Vivek, save us from this folly!
They will certainly have the opportunity to do so once the Republicans are installed in power.
House Oversight and Reform Committee Chairman James Comer (R-Ky.) is telling the Postal Service that the days of easy money for EVs are over.
"The days of bailouts and handouts are over. The American people spoke loud and clear. I worry about that EV money sitting around, that it may be clawed back. I think there are lots of areas where there’s going to be significant reform over the next four years,” Comer told Postmaster General Louis DeJoyn at a hearing last week.
"We’re today ramping up production,” Oshkosh CEO John Pfeifer told investors. “When you go through — you take a brand-new vehicle to market, we believe, together with the Postal Service, that a prudent production schedule is better than trying to start by sprinting. So we’re ramping up today. We’ll be at full production throughout 2025.”
In less than a year they're going to ramp up production from producing one vehicle a day to 80? I call bullcrap on that.
And the idea that it's better not to start fast when you've signed a contract to, well, start fast, is almost beyond belief.
A Postal Service spokesperson said several issues with the NGDV program were detailed in the inspector general audit and “resolved directly with our supplier.” But the agency declined to comment on specific questions or identify which issues the report helped resolve. The spokesperson called the truck procurement “a large, successful program that for a variety of reasons had many moving parts.
"Many moving parts" is government-ese for "We don't know what the hell we're doing." The crew responsible for these boondoggles can't be out of Washington soon enough.
