ATLANTA — The largest fleet of vehicles in the country is going electric. The United States Postal Service just unveiled some of their new EV delivery fans at an event in northwest Atlanta.
Channel 2′s Steve Gehlbach reported live on Channel 2 Action News at Noon from the USPS service and delivery system after the unveiling.
Gehlbach learned that you could start seeing these vans on the road by the end of February with the goal of completely replacing all US mail trucks with electric by 2028.
“This is a massive undertaking,” Postmaster General Louis DeJoy said Monday.
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DeJoy and White House officials visited Atlanta on Monday to show off the first of the new, nationwide fleet of electric postal delivery vehicles. About 237 vans and carriers will run routes from the facility in northwest Atlanta that currently operates out of nine, local post offices.
The first in the fleet are all Ford E-transit battery-electric vehicles.
“Those are not gas arms hooked up to the vehicles. They are electric charging stations. These are the first deliveries of 66,000 electric vehicles we will be deploying across the nation over the next five years.”
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USPS officials hope seeing EVs on your street every day will get consumers more used to them. They say using them in such a large fleet, running fixed routes and being easy to plug in each night addresses concerns about electricity’s lack of range and access to charging stations.
Gehlbach asked White House Senior Advisor John Podesta about concerns in building all-electric vehicles, the supply chain, batteries and the amount of rare metals that need to be mined in other countries.
“I think there’s been a renaissance in US manufacturing, all the way from critical minerals through to the finished product…so that’s all a good news story, but also a work in progress,” Podesta said.
The electric vehicles are not zero emission as it takes power to charge each day. The source at the facility and the charging stations is Georgia Power which uses a mix of mostly natural gas, oil, coal and nuclear.
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