I would not have believed this had I not seen this come from this idiot’s Senator’s mouth. Take the three most inefficient and subsidized things in government today, add them together, and there’s no way that spells SUCCESS. It does spell FAIL though.
From Fox News website (via C-SPAN)
As the potential collapse of the United States Postal Service looms on the horizon, one Senate Democrat has proposed an unusual plan to solve the crisis.
Senator Tom Carper (D-DE) looks to harvest the electricity that windmill farms produce in order to power a new fleet of battery-operated postal delivery vehicles, replacing the previous ’25 to 30 years old’ ‘dilapidated’ vehicles.
The Senator admits the idea is “out there” but concludes that “we need to be thinking boldly, and the postal service needs to do that”
Watch the video:
If you are a constituent you need to sound off. The stupidity of this idea is not only robust, it is unprecedented. Electric vehicles do better on long hauls and commutes, stop/start a thousand times a day at each mailbox, not so much.
They’d be FORD’s (Found On Road Discharged) the first day.
(h/t) Committee on Oversight and Government Reform
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But, but, but…Britain had a whole fleet of electric milk delivery vehicles from the 50’s to the 80’s – or so. They worked really well, and that was door to door delivery just like mail. You have a known, shortish route each day. It’s very stop-start, and then you drive back to the depot to recharge overnight, using off peak power.
The reason that Britain used electric vehicles for this is that they delivered the milk very early in the morning and they wanted to be quiet – but it would still work for mail services.
So the 50 odd years of national milk delivery i n the Uk by electric milk float did not work.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milk_float
Stop start, rain shine, heat cold, they always got through.
Here in the UK we have used small electric vehicles to deliver milk to households for decades.
These are door to door runs through residential areas. They must be economically feasible to have been used for so long and will do 60+ miles on an overnight 240V charge.
In a recent flash of inspiration, where I live they are also being used for small parcel deliveries. When you hear the faint whirr of the milk float go past first thing in the morning it could mean when you finally get out of bed you could find two pints of milk and that book you ordered waiting for you.
http://www.milkfloats.org.uk/
For all those that pointed out that the UK has an electric milk car, I had no idea. I’m only drawing on my own experience with my own electric cars (I’ve had three now) and while I can maybe get 40 miles on a charge in point to point driving, it drops to a little more than half that in stop/go city traffic. Watching the ammeter when starting shows significant power surges, up to 150 amps, which is my max battery output in my current model. So the question is: what is different about the UK milk delivery vehicles? Anyone have a picture of the innards and/or specs?
Thinking boldly? How about thinking about reigning in deficits for starters? How in the world does using electric vehicles, energized miraculously only by windmills (even if it were possible) save the post office? How does such a man get elected to such a high office?
Doomed I tell you…..
Mr. Lynn and BarryW are right. Electric is best at stop-start service; most actually recover some energy from “braking” regen, to the point that users actually have little use for their friction brakes. They are also very efficient at low RPM and speeds, when ICE engines are very wasteful. Miles per charge of EVs soars in pure stop-go city driving, but declines at highway speeds, the opposite of ICE cars.
Sorry, Anthony, you got that point backwards.
REPLY: Again, going from my own experience with my own electric vehicles, start/stop reduces the range – significantly. I suppose it all depends on the design. An electric vehicle designed to meet speeds needed for city/highway transit is a different animal than a milk truck…clearly they worked in Britain, so the question is would they work for the US mail? Any of the NEV’s with 35mph top speeds I have driven clearly would not. – Anthony
Anthony; your personal experience suggests no regen, and a very “primitive” EV. What are you driving?
Carper should check with Hank Johnson to be sure the new vehicles won’t capsize when washed.
PS;
At highway speeds, air resistence is the dominant MPG determinant. If you have a little boxy golf-cart-type vehicle, vs. a slippery highway design, then you’re just using the wrong tool for the job.
Unless your car was designed to work like a box-fish; Mercedes did a concept car back in ’05 with a very unusual shape:
http://www.gizmag.com/go/4133/
http://www.michaelmcfadyenscuba.info/images/boxfish.jpg
Anthony – try wikipedia as a start: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milk_float
This may not be as straight forward as it seems. Here in Connecticut the commuter railroad from New Haven to New York has been electrified for more than half a century. Stations are about ten to fifteen miles apart, and electric trains, which draw their power from overhead wires for most of the trip and then “third rail” starting in the Bronx, are better able to get up to speed and then decelerate than diesels, which are better suited for long-haul, steady speed operations. Internal combustion engine vehicles also have better mileage on highways than in stop and go city traffic. It would not surprise me that electric vehicles do somewhat better in cost-per-mile and time-in route than IC vehicles in stop and go situations, but if electric costs are necessarily going to sky rocket, that advantage may not be permanent.
It’s all good. Nothing teaches like failure. When this falls apart on the very first day, there are going to be a lot of people in that classroom suddenly forced to look again and think New Thoughts. There’ll be a bunch more of converts out of this.
If I ever (shudder to think) just had to be forced to get into one of those little cars… first, it would have a blinking light on top. Second, I would have a good loud cb radio with a springy antenna to try to talk to the trucker that just lodged me underneath his semi-trailer. With the side-skirts they have on many trailers now, nobody might ever see someone hung under there. Third, smoke bombs to hopefully attract attention with. Fourth, something to flatten tires with, like possibly a 30-06.
@ur momisugly Mr Lynn and DirkH
Gimme a Ford over the Govt. Motors any day.
Maybe the USPS should replace their fleet with some Karma’s… they could get a custom model…perhaps named the SNAFU…
I had a Pinto in college…it was in near mint condition when Grandma handed over the keys…
It took me up to Mt. Baker, and its record snowfalls, no problems, I just left early to avoid traffic. It was hard to get the 207’s wedged inside however. I never had an issue with the gas tank, but there was a stick plugging a hole in the oil pan for awhile…we took it on a few dirt roads on our piscatorial pursuits!
Maybe we could generate electricty from all the hot air coming from Washington DC.
Slow down guys. Electric vehicles could work. As Anthony says range and battery life would be way less for stop & go than for cruising but good engineering could make it function. Dynamic braking is proportional to the cube of velocity so it would be ineffective at low speeds. I have observed this on electric tower cranes.
The issue is that the business model is bad and that type of delivery needs to be replaced with centralised box sites and less frequent delivery by subcontractors. Get rid of all the vehicles. The whole system has to be rationalised to current needs. Expensive new vehicles are a red herring solution. The windmills are just plain nutty.
Lew Skannen says:
April 25, 2012 at 7:27 pm
Well that was quick!
I started my daily ‘spot the lunatic’ exercise and finished in less than two minutes. An all time record.
______________________________________________________________
It is not often that reading this website invokes audible laughter from me….chortles, smiles, frowns….etc., yes, but not what just occured before this keyboard.
Thank you.
Anthony
You confessed you did not know about UK electric milk floats. Here is a site which tells you everything you need to know about them;
http://www.milkfloats.org.uk/faq.html
They have been used for at least 60 years here and are absolutely brilliant in not only their ability to carry large heavy loads and their quieteness, but also that they seem idealy suited to their stop start nature.
As several other people have commented, a similar technology is being used for private parcel deliveries but currently on a small scale.
All in all this seems a very sound and practical idea by the postal services provided they meet similar criteria to milk deliveries as regards distances travelled etc
tonyb
Electric vehicles do better on long hauls and commutes, stop/start a thousand times a day at each mailbox, not so much.
I don’t know why you would say this. Electric vehicles have long been used for stop/start applications. 50 years ago in the UK most people had their milk delivered by electric milk floats. Their average distance between stops would have been 20 or 30 feet. Include regenerative braking and they would be far more energy efficient than petrol vehicles.
The windmills are of course a bad idea.
I lived in England for some years. The milk floats were quite large (think the size but not the shape of a mini-bus). It is worth noting that although they were used to deliver milk, they were not used for delivering mail, probably because they were very slow and were only used in the early mornings before traffic hit the road. As an early morning driver, I can tell you they were bloody awful to be stuck behind.
Anthony-
Perhaps the difference in the milk floats and an electric car is the max speed. Looking at the Wikipedia article,. the milk float’s speed was between 10 and 16 mph (16 and 26kph).
While 10 mph is probably okay for house-to-house delivery in a residential neighborhood, it is going to be too slow to get from the P.O. to where the route begins. It is interesting to note that the wikipedia article says that many electric milk floats are being replaced with petrol and diesel powered vehicles to speed delivery.
I too recall that the USPS experimented with electric vehicles. From a Washington Post article, March 4, 2010, about yet another proposal for the USPS to use electric vehicles, at :
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/03/03/AR2010030304085.html
“Electric vehicles are not new to the Postal Service. They were in use early in the 1990s but fell to the wayside because batteries were too big, and gas was incredibly cheap, said Nancy Pope, a curator at the National Postal Museum. Since then, the Postal Service has employed other alternative-fuel vehicles, including 30 electric trucks that are used to take mail to processing plants in New York City, Brennan said.
Electric-car manufacturers have been eyeing partnerships with the Postal Service for years. In 1996, the Postal Service teamed with General Motors to convert several delivery trucks to electric power, but GM ended up canceling its entire electric-vehicle program a couple years later because production costs were too high. In 2000, Ford was awarded a contract for 500 electric vehicles, but that program was canceled because of limited battery availability, and Ford dropped its electric-vehicle program because of high costs as well”
Anthony, milk float electrics ar quite simple. Control systems reminiscent of the late 1800’s. 🙂 Top speed usually less than 15 mph.
Here’s a fan site with some technical documents.
Methinks that a hybrid is a much better idea, using the electric drive for transmission and a small diesel generator to charge the batteries and to provide some of the necessary drive current during acceleration and all of it when “cruising”.
Can’t quote an actual spec for the UK milk float but, if it helps, about three tons of its three-and-a-half ton tare weight was the tray of (lead-acid) battery under the floor pan. I know this because a (then) milkman friend, after a good night out, loaded up his float one morning, drove out of the depot, fell asleep at the wheel and – without trying! – wrote off four of his workmates’ vehicles, which had been parked opposite the depot entrance. Ouch! So start from assuming that most of the weight was lead in the batteries. It would be interesting to see how (say) a Li-ion model compares.
However, fond memories of ’em – as others have pointed out, they worked really well, and obviously lasted long enough to be economically realistic. You used to see surprisingly old milk floats still doing their daily duty after 20 years or more on the road.
It sounds like the US postal service is going the same way as the British one. Since the Fedex’s, DHL’s and so on were allowed to leach all the profitable (mostly round-town business post) services from the Post Office, the latter has struggled visibly to maintain something like their previously excellent service. They – but not the others – are still required to provide “universal” service (i.e. including collections and deliveries in outlying places like the Shetland Isles, Scilly Isles, and so on), which costs money they no longer have coming in. Result: the price of stamps is going up another 30-35% at the end of this month and their business will drop even further. Sometimes, a state-operated monopoly can knock the “free” market into a cocked hat, as the present versus former state of the British Post Office proves.
Further to my post at 12.10.
Some people have commented on the speed of electric vehicles such as milk floats, but that is to assume that the vehicle collecting mail from the mail boxes then delivering bulk mail to the sorting office will be the same one as will deliver to individual households. Surely this is unlikely as the amount of mail going to individual rounds could not justify a vehicle as large as the one that transports the bulk mail around, which is likely to cause traffic problems in suburban streets anyway.
Therefore, whilst speed may matter at one part of the collection process it is likely to be much less important during the final delivery aspect as this is limited anyway by the need to continually stop start.
As for the comment that the milk services are swapping to petrol/diesel vehicles, this is true but this seems an attempt to ‘modernise’ rather than because its a good idea. This urge to modernise at all costs ironically caused the closure of the Royal Mails own dedicated underground railway line beneath London with all that means in terms of greater traffic now clogging up the streets overhead. This was a truly awesome system described in the link below.
http://www.silentuk.com/?p=2792
tonyb
This is well worth 4 minutes of your time…
“If I wanted America to fail”
I drove a milk float back in the early ’70s. As has been pointed out, the top speed was derisory (and the comments from motorists stuck behind us very illuminating for a 14 year-old school boy!) but the acceleration to around 15 mph was quite good. The cornering was a bit suspect as well, not helped by the flat platform for the milk crates which tended to throw them onto the road if one’s driving was a bit “enthusiastic”.
And, yes, for all those from the UK who might be about to write in pointing out that 14 year-old school boys weren’t old enough to have a driving licence, I know. Some things were best kept quiet for a few years.