EVDL Administrator via EV wrote:
A fuel-fired heater would be a practical answer for winter. Aircon might be
a tougher problem.
Over the years, the USPS has carried out several EV trials with small fleets
in limited areas. I don't think they considered any of them successful.
However, I'm pretty sure that all of them used lead batteries. I wonder if
one of those programs might be where this guy got his odd "30 to 34
batteries" idea.
My father was a mail carrier. The Post Office lives in its own odd
little world. They aren't looking for NEW solutions to their problems;
they want ways to keep using their OLD solutions.
Yes, there have been many postal EV trials. They were always imposed
from the *outside*. The Post Office fought against them. The union in
particular (NALC) was vehemently opposed to change. Workers went so far
as to sabotage the EV trials, to make *sure* they failed.
I had one of these postal EVs myself (a 1980 Commuter Vehicles
ComutaVan). My father drove it, and said "it works fine, but I'd never
use it. Too different. We like what we got."
It seemed to me that the whole system was set up to invite failure.
First, the trials were forced from outside (by Congress). The post
office didn't want the vehicles, so they wrote idiosyncratic requirement
that discouraged companies from bidding. They are terrible judges of
technology, and picked the companies to make the vehicles based on
lobbying, who is in which congressman's district, who are we already
buying vehicles from, etc. The companies often saw it as a pork-barrel
project (a way to get government money for doing a bad job). The Union
"shop class" types that service their ICE vehicles were "gear heads"
that hated the whole idea of EVs.
I wonder what would happen if Tesla took a page from Apple, and offered
"free trial" EVs to the Post Office? Like Apple offering free computers
to schools, "free" got them hooked. Then they went on to spend billions
of dollars to buy more. Apple got all their money back, and a lot more! >;-)
--
We cannot waste time. We can only waste ourselves.
-- George Matthew Adams
--
Lee Hart, 814 8th Ave N, Sartell MN 56377, leeah...@earthlink.net
_______________________________________________
UNSUBSCRIBE: http://www.evdl.org/help/index.html#usub
http://lists.evdl.org/listinfo.cgi/ev-evdl.org
For EV drag racing discussion, please use NEDRA
(http://groups.yahoo.com/group/NEDRA)
