The United States Postal Service is getting new delivery vehicles. They also look very silly because of a very strict set of design parameters from the government. We’ve only really seen them in images from the USPS, though. That changes now. Finally, we’re seeing test vehicles out on the road and, well, they look even funnier than in the official photos.
The images we’re seeing today were taken by Dalton Priebe, a car enthusiast in Colorado. He posted them online, and we couldn’t stop looking at them. Cartoon car, Pixar mail carrier, mail truck in a planet run by ducks, all of these phrases could be used to describe it.
The vehicle is formally known as the Next Generation Delivery Vehicle and it’s produced by the Oshkosh Corporation, which makes many other vehicles primarily for the U.S. military. We’ve reached out to the company to see what these NGDVs were doing in Colorado. If the “test vehicle” labels on the carriers are any indication, they were probably out testing in high-altitude conditions and Colorado has plenty.
It’s unclear what drivetrain underpins these particular vehicles. It’s possible these are some of the electric mail trucks we’ve heard so much about, but it’s hard to tell. The underbody of either car is not visible and there is no visible tailpipe. At least half of the NGDVs produced will be electric. Regular gas-powered NGDVs receive a 3.5-liter V6 engine sourced from Ford.
The first NGDVs will hit the streets sometime in 2023. Oshkosh will produce between 50,000 and 165,000 vehicles for the Postal Service over a period of 10 years. For reference, the USPS currently operates over 100,000 Grumman LLVs, the current iconic mail delivery workhorse.
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