Indiana Company Earns Contract to Electrify Postal Vehicle
The climbing cost of postal stamps in recent years plus the United States Postal Service's (USPS) plan to reduce street delivery to five days a week is evidence the organization is struggling to cut costs and maintain its viability in the age of e-mail. Anderson-based Bright Automotive believes it has a solution that would move the USPS into the future and slash millions of dollars from its annual budget: electrifying its142,000 mail delivery trucks—the world's largest civilian vehicle fleet.
"For every one cent of increase at the fuel pump, the USPS budget is
hit with an $8 million increase in cost on an annual basis," says Bright
Automotive Vice President of Marketing and Sales Lyle Shuey. "By going
to an electrified vehicle platform, that volatility toward fuel cost is
basically eliminated."
Recognizing that converting its fleet to electric could be a critical
innovation for its future, the USPS is contracting with Bright and five
other manufacturers throughout the country to launch a year-long pilot
program to develop and test electric mail delivery trucks.
Under the contract, Bright will retrofit a standard USPS Long Life
Vehicle (LLV) with an electric drive train. The makeover will result in a
fully electric delivery truck that uses no gasoline—a stark contrast to
the LLVs the USPS has been using for decades, which have an average
fuel economy of only 10 miles per gallon. Bright is partnering with
Detroit automotive supplier EDAG, another recipient of the contract,
which will complete the heavy metal fabrication for the conversion.
After Bright completes work on the postal vehicle in July, it will be
used in "real world" service in the Washington, D.C. area for at least
one year.
"We believe the USPS vehicles, as the largest fleet in the U.S., is the
perfect opportunity to bring electrified transportation to the mass
market," says Shuey. "By looking at a large fleet such as the USPS, we
can quickly reduce our dependence on foreign oil, reduce carbon
emissions through fuel reduction and provide an example for the public
that electrified transportation is real, economic, and can bring great
value to the market in the U.S." Listen
At its headquarters in Anderson, Bright is currently developing the
IDEA, a light commercial plug-in hybrid electric vehicle for commercial
and government fleets. Scheduled for production in 2013, company leaders
say Indiana is on the "short list" of locations for the manufacturing
site for the IDEA. Bright eSolutions Executive Vice President Nigel
Francis says the ability to move quickly into full scale production
helped the company earn the USPS contract.
"Our core expertise is vehicle electrification for series production;
it's not a one-off conversion" says Francis. "Actually preparing a
vehicle for series production where you'd be producing tens of thousands
or hundreds of thousands of vehicles is a very different engineering
task than making a one-off vehicle."
In addition to production capability, Shuey says the IDEA program is
providing a long list of elements that will be incorporated into the
USPS conversion project.
"We're taking the electric drive motor system as a package from the IDEA
and basically plugging it into the postal service vehicle," says Shuey.
Listen
Bright engineers say experience gained during the development of the
IDEA will also provide a very smooth path for the postal LLV conversion
project. Vice President of Vehicle Engineering Hadrian Rori believes
Bright has already cleared many of the technical "hurdles" during its
development of the IDEA. Additionally, he says the stop-and-start nature
of postal trucks is an ideal platform for an electric vehicle.
"When we electrify the power train, we can actually take advantage of
that stopping with regenerative braking," says Rori. "We use
regenerative braking to absorb some of the energy that would be normally
dissipated in heat and can use that to recharge the batteries and make
the vehicle more efficient. It's a great duty cycle for an EV power
train." Listen
The USPS attempted partnerships with two auto manufacturers in the past
to bring electric delivery trucks to the neighborhoods of America, but
they failed due to high production costs or lack of battery
availability. However, Bright leaders believe now—over a decade
later—the pieces are in place to update the world's largest civilian
vehicle fleet.
"We will provide the USPS a demonstration vehicle that quantifies the
value that can be brought forth economically for the USPS," says Shuey.
"Out of this test and demonstration period, we believe the postal
service will have proof of technology readiness and economic viability
to move forward with a process where they replace all 142,000 of these
vehicles in the marketplace. We believe—as does the USPS—this technology
can dramatically change how those neighborhood vehicles operate on a
daily basis."