Why Postal Carriers Are In Love With Their Cartoonishly Ugly New Trucks

For more than 37 years, the Grumman LLV has been an icon of American mail delivery. These trucks have been absolute troopers, lasting far longer than they were even designed to go. Now, they’re passing the torch to the Next Generation Delivery Vehicle, which is finally getting into the hands of the postal carriers that keep America moving. There’s good news because the trucks are seemingly a hit out of the park with postal carriers absolutely in love with their ugly ducklings.

The Next Generation Delivery Vehicle, or NGDV, has been a long time coming. It’s been nearly a decade since the United States Postal Service launched a bidding process on a new truck and the program has seen delay after delay. However, as the Associated Press reports, the first production NGDVs finally hit the road last month, closing the book on one era of postal delivery while cracking open some fresh pages of a new era.

Soon, the iconic Grumman LLV will be allowed to retire and in its place will be the Oshkosh Defense NGDV, which looks like something you’d see out of a Despicable Me movie or perhaps a Richard Scarry book. But, even better is the fact that, according to the AP report, mail carriers love that their trucks have finally been brought out of the 1980s, which is great because for how cool the Grumman LLV was, it had some critical flaws that were never fixed.

A Long Time Coming

It feels like car sites have been talking about the Next Generation Delivery Vehicle forever, and that’s in part because the process of creating the new mail truck has taken an entire decade.

According to the National Association Of Letter Carriers, the journey of the NGDV officially started in 2014. Back then, the USPS was sitting on a fleet of more than 135,000 Grumman LLVs and the youngest ones were 20 years old. The Grumman LLV was initially expected to service the postal service for 24 years, but these trucks have excelled in living up to their ‘Long Life Vehicle’ name. Prior to the LLV, the post office used to have existing vehicles modified for mail delivery duty, resulting in rides like the famous Jeep Dispatcher. The LLV was a shift from the USPS making an existing vehicle work to creating what it thought was the perfect mail truck for the era.

As the AP reports, mail carriers were totally pumped to be getting out of their Jeeps and into the LLV, which looked all-new, but was cleverly a repurposed Chevrolet S-10 with a snazzy aluminum body and built to survive some serious abuse. Now, the mail carriers of today are excited all over again because the postal truck has finally become a modern vehicle.

In 2014, the USPS reached out to the National Association Of Letter Carriers union, asking for input on what the new postal truck should be like. The postal carriers had a lot of input, too, as the existing Grumman LLVs didn’t even have air-conditioning for those sweltering days. Those old LLVs didn’t have much in the way of safety, either.

By 2015, the USPS got a rough idea of what it wanted and solicited design proposals from manufacturers. The USPS selected 15 prequalified companies to submit design proposals. As CNBC reported, General Motors showed interest in getting the contract as well, but it wasn’t on the prequalified list. In 2015, CNBC reported that it was estimated that the winner of the contract would see a cash infusion of $5 billion and that the USPS hoped that the production NGDV would cost in the ballpark of $25,000 to $35,000 per unit. At the time, the USPS was noted to have about 200,000 postal vehicles in use and it wanted 180,000 NGDVs to replace most of them.

That year, the U.S. Postal Service Engineering Department published a 49-page draft detailing what the postal service was looking for in its new trucks. The paper opens with:

This specification covers new commercially manufactured right-hand drive vehicles having a minimum of 4.38 cubic meters (155 cubic feet) cargo stowage capacity, and a minimum rated payload capacity of not less than 680 kilograms (kg) (1,500 lbs.). Unless otherwise specified, the body shall be constructed of any combination of aluminum alloy, plastic, or composite materials having the necessary structural characteristics to provide the level of service and life expectancy detailed in this specification. The body shall have a design goal of attaining a 20-year vehicle life cycle. The power train shall have a design goal of a minimum life expectancy of 12 years while withstanding the unique rigors of its intended use.

Other goodies contained in those 49 pages include a body designed to be easily and cheaply repaired, windshield wiper pivots engineered to withstand extended use, the elimination of crevices for mail to accidentally fall into, improved electrical systems to prevent fires, and of course, greater interior comfort for letter carriers. That’s just a slice of what the USPS wanted the manufacturers to hopefully incorporate into their designs.

Performance requirements are also interesting, as the USPS wanted the new truck to be able to cruise at 65 mph on flat ground, take no longer than 35 seconds to hit 65 mph, be able to maintain 45 mph on a 2.5 percent grade, and to be capable of driving up a 20 percent grade in both forward and reverse.

In 2016, the USPS whittled the list of proposals down to six: AM General with a powertrain from Emerald Automotive; Karsan with bodywork by Morgan Olson; Oshkosh Defense with powertrain by Ford; Workhorse with a body by VT Hackney; Mahindra; and Utilimaster. All were all given contracts to build prototype NGDVs, which were put through abusive testing. When the bid for a new postal truck launched the USPS estimated the trucks would be on the road by 2018. Yet, the postal service didn’t even get the prototypes until 2017.

Competition was fierce, but as Emerald Automotive suggested in a 2022 piece by Vice, only the AM General/Emerald and the Oshkosh/Ford trucks survived the testing without constantly breaking down. Some competitors didn’t even stick around either. Utilimaster threw up the white flag early on in 2017 while Mahindra managed to stick around until 2020. By the end of that year, just three were left with Karsan, Oshkosh, and Workhorse. In 2021, the USPS selected Oshkosh and Ford to deliver the mail of the future.

The contract won by Oshkosh called for the USPS to purchase between 50,000 and 165,000 vehicles, and use those vehicles to phase out the old LLVs over about a decade of time. The USPS also tossed Oshkosh $482 million to help bring the truck to final production spec.

Drama erupted after Oshkosh won the bid. Workhorse sued and then dropped the case. Later, it was discovered that the Oshkosh NGDV got around 8 mpg, no better than the LLV it was replacing, though the NGDV got that fuel economy with air-conditioning – a feature LLVs don’t have. Another bombshell landed in 2021 when Postmaster General Louis DeJoy said that only 10 percent of the NGDVs would be electric models because it would be too cost-prohibitive to buy more. This didn’t go over well with 16 states, six non-profit groups, a number of cities, the EPA, the Biden Administration, and more.

Each pressured the USPS with public messaging andd through lawsuits to order more EVs. The 60,000 unit initial order eventually increased from 10 percent EVs to 20 percent, to 50 percent, and then finally, as Car and Driver reports, to 75 percent. By 2026, the USPS says all of its new NGDV orders will be electric.

The trucks were supposed to launch in 2023 but were delayed until this summer. Finally, they’re hitting the road.

Mail Carriers Are In Love

As the AP reports, the NGDVs are out there and delivering the mail at last. The USPS also hasn’t backed down from its promise to make sure that most of the NGDVs are all-electric.

All of this is good news because, as the AP notes, the Grumman LLVs aren’t nearly as beloved by postal carriers as they are by myself and many Autopians. According to LLV operators, the machines are noisy, inefficient, and dangerously hot on sizzling days. As the AP notes, the LLVs are hot in other ways, too, such as the fact that nearly 100 of them caught fire last year alone. So, just about everyone wants them gone already. I asked my own letter carrier what he thinks about his LLV and he said, quote: “It’s slow and ridiculously hot.”

Sadly for the letter carriers around America, the death of the LLV will be slow. The USPS expects to have around 60,000 NGDVs on the road within the next few years and the rest of the LLV fleet will likely be retired within a decade.

The AP notes that right out of the gate, letter carriers just love the fact that you can see out of the NGDV and it isn’t a sweatbox. From the AP:

Even tall postal carriers can stand up without bonking their heads and walk from front to back to retrieve packages. For safety, the vehicles have airbags, 360-degree cameras, blind-spot monitoring, collision sensors and anti-lock brakes — all of which are missing on the Grummans.

The new trucks also feature something common in most cars for more than six decades: air conditioning. And that’s key for drivers in the Deep South, the desert Southwest and other areas with scorching summers.

“I promise you, it felt like heaven blowing in my face,” Stonum said of her first experience working in an air-conditioned truck.

Others just love the fact that the new trucks don’t kill your back or break down from the AP:

Richard Burton, another driver, said he appreciates the larger payload area, which can accommodate bigger packages, and the fact that he doesn’t have to crouch, helping him avoid back pain. The old trucks also had a habit of breaking down in traffic, he added.

Brian Renfroe, president of the National Letter Carriers Association, said union members are enthusiastic about the new vehicles, just as they were when the Grummans marked a leap forward from the previous old-school Jeeps. He credited DeJoy with bringing a sense of urgency to get them into production.

“We’re excited now to be at the point where they’re starting to hit the streets,” Renfroe said.

There’s more to love, too. The ICE trucks have a Ford EcoBoost 2.0-liter four making 250 HP and 206 lb-ft of torque, which means they can run circles around the archaic LLVs. An eight-speed transmission backs that engine and it’s expected that there will be both 2WD and 4WD variants of the NGDV. Most of them will have a Bosch electric motor with 200 HP of peak output and 94 HP of continuous output. These will be fed from 94 kWh batteries and they will be operated on routes no further than 70 miles.

Sadly, it’s not all good news. The 2022 NGDV order called for the procurement of 50,000 units at a price of $2.98 billion. Neither Oshkosh nor the USPS has given exact pricing on the NGDVs, but if that order is anything to go off of, the NGDVs came in at far more expensive than originally projected.

Still, if letter carriers are happy, and it sounds like they are, then it’s probably money well spent. These trucks are totally function over form, in an endearing way, and they’re delivering the mail far better than their predecessors. Maybe, one day the NGDV will be as much as a mail icon as the LLV.

(Images: USPS, unless otherwise noted.)