Bright Automotive Awarded Contract for Electric Postal Delivery Vehicle

The Ubiquitous USPS LLV







The USPS has been in the news lately due to a budgetary crisis and their reliance upon government loans that are nearing the maximum allowable amounts. One of the solutions being proposed is a five day work week, eschewing Saturdays. This scenario is obviously unpopular with the public. Our postal service needs to dig deeper and come up with a better answer for cutting costs.

We think the USPS is long overdue for an alternate energy fleet. Especially appealing is the utilization of electric delivery vans for urban use. The average long life vehicle (LLV) travels about 20 miles a day and gets 10 mpg. Atrocious. A small to medium sized battery pack can easily meet the needs of these LLV's. Let's replace this entire fleet with EV's and eliminate the need for gasoline, the need for costly ICE maintenance and eliminate the pollution. The perfect scenario for this trasformation is our letter carrier fleet. They use the LLV's during the day and then plug them in overnight. Throw in some solar roof panels at the Post Office and you have a great renewable, low cost solution.

What are the odds of this scenario being fulfilled?

From Green Car Congress:

Bright Automotive, the developer of the purpose-built, plug-in hybrid IDEA (earlier post), has been awarded one of five contracts by the United States Postal Service (USPS) to develop and test an electric postal delivery vehicle. Under the contract, Bright Automotive’s eSolutions team (earlier post) will retrofit a standard USPS Long Life Vehicle (LLV) with an integrated electric drive train, and place the vehicle in real-world service for one year in the Washington DC area.

Other awards have gone to ZAP (earlier post); Quantum Fuel Systems Technologies Worldwide, Inc. (earlier post); AC Propulsion and AutoPort (earlier post); and Germany-based international transportation engineering firm EDAG, with whom Bright eSolutions is also collaborating. Thus, Bright eSolutions is providing powertrain hardware and software support for two of the five contracts awarded under the program.

Some of the same enabling technology developed on the IDEA will be directly applied to the EV propulsion conversion of the LLV. As an example, Bright said, applying the rear electric drive of the IDEA PHEV powertrain to the LLV positions Bright Automotive’s conversion with proven production-intent technology.

The Bright eSolutions retrofit LLV is fully electric and is capable of covering a high percentage of existing postal service routes. After delivery to the USPS in July 2010, the vehicle will go into service in the metro Washington DC area for at least one year.

The USPS currently operates 142,000 LLVs, which average less than 20 miles of driving per day and have an average fuel economy of only 10 mpg.

The IDEA, Bright noted, is now scheduled for production in 2013. At the reveal of the IDEA in April 2009, Bright had said that high volume production of the IDEA would begin in the US by the end of 2012, with an annual run rate of 50,000 units beginning in 2013.