New USPS electric vans delayed until mid-2024, according to court docs

Enlarge / The United States Postal Service’s Next Generation Delivery Vehicle is delayed, we learned today. (credit: Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images)

The United States Postal Service’s attempt to replace its aging fleet of delivery vans with a more efficient model is going to take longer than anticipated. Originally, the USPS was to accept the first of its new Next Generation Delivery Vehicles by December of this year. But that has been pushed back until June 2024 at the earliest, according to court documents.

An unambitious plan

The quest to replace the US Postal Service’s aging and increasingly dangerous Grumman LLVs began in 2015. After several years of evaluation, in 2021 the USPS announced it had arrived at a winner—a rather odd-looking van with something of a duckbill, designed by defense contractor Oshkosh. The USPS said it wanted to order between 50,000-165,000 NGDVs over a 10-year period, with an initial contract of $485 million.

Enthusiasm over the announcement was rapidly tempered, however. The NGDV has been designed to be powertrain-agnostic and can be fitted either with electric motors and a lithium-ion battery or an internal combustion engine. And it rapidly became clear that only a small minority of NGDVs—10 percent in fact—would be battery-electric vehicles.