
Reinventing the Mail Truck - e15ctr0n
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/03/06/automobiles/the-mail-truck-is-a-classic-and-thats-a-problem-for-a-modern-post-office.html
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pakled_engineer
Before I worked @ my current job hacking together DSLs I was a postie in
Canada while going to school. Those new trucks are almost exactly the same as
the one's used here, but left-hand drive. Problem w/right-hand drive is the
enormous blind spot where you don't see people stepping off the curb in front
of your truck or cyclists using a 4 way stop. Look at the picture of the guy
in the older truck, there's 2 beams obstructing his view and the side mirrors
(the mirrors on the left side are the same size as the right side). When you
pull up to a 4 way stop and glance over to the right anybody on a bicycle is
perfectly obstructed by the double mirrors and double beams. They of course go
first and you think you're clear to go and almost hit them every time. This
happened so much we had to roll down the windows and actually stick our heads
out to look to see who was on the right in an intersection. Probably something
to think about when they design these vehicles.

Canada Post are also concentrating on parcels and not caring so much any more
about lettermail or physical spam as a result are making $200+ million per
quarter in profit now as Fedex and UPS losing business to them.

They are also contracting out somebody to build them new devices and dumping
Microsoft handheld scanners for something else, which they haven't decided
upon yet. If you run such a corp should probably start shilling your services
to them.

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soperj
I wonder if a company like tesla would put in a bid? You'd think electric
would be the way to go when they spend over half a billion on gas each year,
the extra cost for the vehicles would pay itself off pretty quickly.

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function_seven
For the constant stopping and starting these vehicles do, it does seem like
electric would be perfect. How many miles a day does a typical mail delivery
truck run? Let say the overall average speed of the truck through out the day
is 10 mph. That puts in in the ballpark of 75 - 100 miles/day. Given that it's
all stop-start movement, that would probably exhaust the battery pack that
comes with the Model S. Regenerative braking would help, though.

Seems perfectly doable. Feel free to correct my napkin math. I could be off
quite a bit but Fermi-wise I think I'm good.

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dbarlett
Background on the current Grumman LLV (Long Life Vehicle):
[http://postalmuseum.si.edu/collections/object-
spotlight/llv....](http://postalmuseum.si.edu/collections/object-
spotlight/llv.html)

Working video link:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qahIvBF3d7g](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qahIvBF3d7g)

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pakled_engineer
Type "USPS Vehicle Catches Fire" into google. For some reason the Grumman
LLV's tend to randomly ignite, so often that Canada ended their lifespan early
and replaced them all with small Ford Transits. Granted this was after decades
of being driven like they were stolen.

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cpursley
Here's a better idea for a USPS mail truck: End the USPS.

All I get is spam. Why are taxpayers subsidizing advertisers?

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cpursley
Interesting on the downvotes. Someone, please make an argument why governments
should provide physical mail services in 2015.

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johnny22
because not everybody has easy access to the internet. Plus, packages can't be
delivered digitally.

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cpursley
Why should government be in the business of delivering packages for private
industry? Infrastructure already exists for this including UPS, Fedex, DSL.

