New USPS ‘Ugly Duckling’ Delivery Vehicle Gets Negative Reception

The United States Postal Service held a press conference last week announcing they had awarded a $482 million contract to Oshkosh Defense to design new delivery vehicles for the agency. The model from Oshkosh Defense, however, has not been received as positively as the U.S.P.S. may have hoped.

This is the new next-gen USPS delivery vehicle coming to your neighborhood by 2023 pic.twitter.com/WkEd3VkHkU

— Sam Mintz (@samjmintz) February 23, 2021

“Looks like sh-t,” said Mike Isaacs, tech reporter for the New York Times. A Twitter poll now with more than 215,000 votes found that 40.2% of users found the design “sleek and cool” while 59.8% called it “an ugly duckling.”

The new trucks will host a suite of modern features including 360-degree cameras, rear-collision avoidance systems, a sliding cargo door and an automatic electronic parking brake. “As the American institution that binds our country together, the U.S. Postal Service can have a bright and modern future if we make investments today that position us for excellence tomorrow,” said United States Post Master General Louis DeJoy in a statement Monday. The USPS’s future is, for better or worse, bound to DeJoy as the postmaster general made known in a recent Congressional hearing, saying “get used to me.”

“The NGDV program expands our capacity for handling more package volume and supports our carriers with cleaner and more efficient technologies, more amenities, and greater comfort and security as they deliver every day on behalf of the American people,” DeJoy said in support of the modern design.

Oshkosh Defense will manufacture 165,000 of the new vehicles over the next decade according the USPS press release in February. The press release also explains that, “The vehicles will be equipped with either fuel-efficient internal combustion engines or battery electric powertrains and can be retrofitted to keep pace with advances in electric vehicle technologies.”

Americans can expect the new Oshkosh-designed vehicles to be in use as soon as 2023.