The Postal Service’s new delivery vehicles aren’t going to win a beauty contest. They’re tall and ungainly. The windshields are vast. Their hoods resemble a duck bill. Their bumpers are enormous.

“You can tell that (the designers) didn’t have appearance in mind,” postal worker Avis Stonum said.

Odd appearance aside, the first handful of Next Generation Delivery Vehicles that rolled onto postal routes in August in Athens, Georgia, are getting rave reviews from letter carriers accustomed to cantankerous older vehicles that lack modern safety features and are prone to breaking down — and even catching fire.

Within a few years, the fleet will have expanded to 60,000, most of them electric models, serving as the Postal Service’s primary delivery truck from Maine to Hawaii.

  • Hossenfeffer@feddit.uk
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    5 days ago

    I mean, sure, it’s no looker, but if it makes mail carriers lives easier then that’s a win. Will probably be ‘iconic’ in a decade or two.

      • Kidding_me@lemmy.world
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        4 days ago

        As most will undoubtedly be walking with their heads in their phones, oblivious to what is going on around them

        • Strawberry@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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          3 days ago

          yeah fuck those dumb pedestrians, never even watching for cars on the sidewalk. Don’t they know that roads and spaces within 30ft of roads are for cars??

      • toast@retrolemmy.com
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        5 days ago

        We should mandate that all large trucks, including pickups, have hoods like these. Such hoods would save lives, and requiring them on large vehicles would undoubtedly lead to newer, smaller sized pickup designs that wouldn’t be required to use them. Win-win