Ford’s USPS Sale

By Douglas A. McIntyre Published Mar 1, 8:30AM EST

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Ford’s USPS Sale — © dhdezvalle / iStock via Getty Images

Buried among the announcements of new stamps, the U.S. Postal Service (USPS) announced it would take delivery of 9,250 Ford E-Transit Battery Electric Vehicles. The USPS has 232,00 vehicles, so it is hard to see why the decision makes any difference to the composition of its fleet. It may be because of political pressure to “green” its fleet as soon as possible. (Click here for the most fuel-efficient new trucks this year.)
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The USPS has a problem common to many electric vehicle (EV) owners, which will restrict its growth in changing its fleet from gasoline-powered trucks: “The Postal Service plans to begin building out its charging infrastructure across a minimum of 75 locations within the next 12 months, and thereafter to continue the infrastructure build out in the succeeding years at many additional facilities as a part of our delivery vehicle electrification strategy.” You cannot drive what you cannot charge. The USPS has over 32,000 locations. Hence, the “charging infrastructure” is extremely small.
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Presumably, the news offers a respite from Ford’s EV problems. These have included production shutdowns of the assembly plants for the F-150 Lightning and pricing confusion for Ford’s electric pickup as well as its Mustang Mach-E.

The USPS continues to grab for positive news. It is too bloated to serve its mission. It has locations in tiny towns that do not need them. Some of these have a population of under 5,000. These were part of a legacy when people needed a post office close by.
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The USPS also insists it has to deliver mail six times a week. E-mail and electronic attachments, along with the ability to buy goods and pay for them online, make this level of physical delivery unnecessary.
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Private enterprises can take on much of what the USPS does. This is particularly true of services from FedEx and UPS, which have to be efficient because they are for-profit public companies.

The purchase of less than 10,000 EV trucks is not news. So why did the USPS make the gesture? It has to justify what cannot be justified.

About the Author Douglas A. McIntyre →

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.