The United States Postal Service (USPS) signed a massive deal with Oshkosh Defense roughly three years ago, which is slated to result in a total replacement of the agency’s Grumman Long Life Vehicle (LLV) fleet with the brand new Next Generation Delivery Vehicle (NGDV). However, USPS is also taking delivery of Ford E-Transit models as a way to more quickly reduce emissions in its fleet, though now, it seems as if deliveries of both of those models are far behind schedule.
According to the Washington Post, it isn’t just the NGDV that’s lagging behind schedule in terms of the number of units that have thus far been delivered to the Post Office, but rather, Ford E-Transit deliveries aren’t up to snuff, either. USPS has reportedly ordered around 5,000 E-Transit vans, but has only received a fraction of that thus far. This is also true of the NGDV, which USPS is slated to purchase 60,000 of in the coming years at a cost of around $10 billion. However, as of this month, the Postal Service has only taken delivery of 93 units, versus the 3,000 that it had previously expected to have in its fleet by now.
It’s unclear why Ford hasn’t been able to fulfill the Post Office’s E-Transit order thus far, but the automaker has been facing tremendous demand for the EV van from various commercial entities since its launch a couple of years ago. The Ford E-Transit models used by USPS are classified as commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) delivery vehicles, which were deployed first in Georgia, followed by other locations around the U.S. As USPS previously pointed out, its new Ford E-Transit vans have nearly three times the cargo capacity of the Grumman LLV delivery vehicles that the it currently uses.
In the meantime, the future of the all-electric version of the NGDV remains a bit murky amid reports that incoming U.S. President Donald Trump is considering terminating the existing contract with Oshkosh and Ford. Regardless, Blue Oval CEO Jim Farley recently stated that he isn’t concerned about any potential changes to policy that Trump may implement regarding the automotive industry as a whole.
Comments
Demand for Ford’s E-transit vans is exceeding current production capacity. This happens. It isn’t easy to expand production and you aren’t going to expand production until you have a contract in hand. Government vehicle delivery from suppliers is often the last delivered. The retail customer comes first.
Oshkosh has never built this type of vehicle in this kind of volume, big mistake.
E-Transit sales are less than 12,000 year to date, so it will take time to get 5,000 deliveries to one customer for sure. I’m sure Ford learned from over-reacting to initial enthusiasm for the F-150 Lightning and will not expand E-Transit production too quickly.