Remember the silly, so-ugly-it’s-adorable-redesign of the U.S. Postal Service mail truck that was revealed last year? While it might have looked like the USPS tapped Homer Simpson to design the thing, it wasn’t so much about the look of the vehicle as what it represented: an opportunity for the federal mail service to go electric. The USPS was due to replace its fleet of dangerous and wildly out-of-date trucks with a modern take that could help to cut back on the country’s greenhouse gas emissions.
It turns out a Trump-era appointee has another idea. Louis DeJoy, the current postmaster general who was put in place by former President Donald Trump, is moving forward with a plan to build and put on the road as many as 165,000 new delivery trucks over the next decade — but he’s making sure that almost all of them are gas-guzzlers. Just 10% of the new vehicles will be electric, and the overall improvement to fuel economy for the full fleet will work out to be just 0.4 miles per gallon, according to The Washington Post.
