The United States Postal Service depends on an armada of big trucks, mail trucks, vans, and contracts with airlines. Then there are the more personal vehicles that carriers use, like Subarus and Jeeps. One postal carrier has some fascinating insights about mail vehicles.
David wrote about right-hand-drive Jeep Postal Units. Younork makes an observation:
Two things.
1st , I’m pretty sure the city of Milwaukee, WI uses RHD 2-door Jeeps as their meter-maid mobiles.2nd, while a true working Jeep is awesome and makes me feel proud to be an American, I still don’t understand how a Jeep Wrangler is the right tool for the job. When I think Wrangler I think compromised. Compromised in space, safety, comfort, cost, and MPG. Compromised for good reason: off road capability. But rural mail carriers don’t need off road capability, they need efficiency.
Idk, maybe I’m wrong. But the rural mail carrier Jeep never made sense to me. If we could import the Toyota JPN Taxi, that’d be perfect.
H4llelujah brings in some great inside baseball:
It’s weird, I’ve observed two things in doing this job, and doing it in a wrangler: it’s both a terrible vehicle for the job, and a fantastic one at the same time.
It’s not a high paying job to begin with, even if you have years and years on the job. You get a separate allowance in your pay for your car. Basically a dollar a mile is what you get to buy, fuel, and maintain your vehicle.
This largely works, but works out better for some.
My route is 50 miles, so pretty much 50 bucks a day. I burn 35 of that up in fuel in my jeep.
My route is REALLY rough, 1/3 is stop and go neighborhood stuff, 1/3rd rural highway, and 1/3 of it is one lane gravel road, covered in washouts, not well plowed in the winters, and a lot of mailboxes that require you to literally drop down into a ditch or climb up a ledge to service from your car. We had a sub try to do it in an AWD CRV on a rainy day and he got his ass kicked. Had 2 flats in one day, and ripped off a mudflap. In the wintertime a postal truck or metris van wouldn’t be able to do the route. Not to mention some of the utterly ridiculous driveways I go up to deliver packages.
And this isn’t the Yukon, this is friggin eastern Ohio.
Just up the road is a neighboring office with a route that spans 120 miles. It pays 120 bucks, and it’s almost all gorgeous smooth paved roads. The girl does it in a pristine 2017 Honda CRV with all season tires, and she burns maybe 30 bucks a day to do it. She also gets about 50-60 packages a day, compared to my 120-200.
More still, some of us are doing this in a Prius or a Chevy Bolt.
But for a lot of routes, You need something tall enough to run 10 ply tires, not get hung up in tight turn arounds in driveways, low enough to slide in and out of all day, able to plow through snowbanks to reach boxes when people don’t shovel, big enough to haul tons of packages, small enough to get reasonable mileage, reliable enough to not break every week, and when it does break, easy enough to find parts for so you can bang out a repair after work and make it back the next day. It also needs to be affordable to buy, new enough to get full coverage insurance on, and old enough to not cry about dogs jumping up to the window and scratching the hell out of the paint.
If I could wave a magic wand, I’d have a factory right hand drive AWD Toyota Sienna with that off road package they have, and somehow be able to afford it.
But I cant, so for me, the Jeep has been the best choice.
Antti wrote about the three-million-kilometer Tesla Model S. I Farted So Hard it Hurts started a thread:
Jesus. He must spend 24 hrs a day driving.
Jb996 was also shocked:
Or charging!
How much of his life has he spent waiting somewhere he really doesn’t want to be?
Here comes Littlebag:
Less than most of us with jobs…
Peter wrote about how cameras thwart lazy insurance fraud attempts. Brock Landers:
I live in northern NJ and pass by this lot often. It’s a large parking lot next to a Trader Joe’s and a hotel (Comfort Inn or similar). This lot will puddle during a regular rain event, and it’s rightnextto the Hudson River. It doesn’t take much to make this area flood. These cars here seem suspect, especially since I would expect the hotel management would likely alert customers to move their cars.
Peter Spinale:
It’s a large parking lot next to a Trader Joe’s
I’m going to stop you right there. There are no large parking lots near Trader Joe’s.
Have a great evening, everyone!
Top graphic image: Lake Elsinore CDJR
One of things I like most about Autopia is how if it involves vehicles, there’s someone here who’s done it, owns it, or built it.
Mercedes could do a piece about the giant NASA space vehicle transport crawler and there’d invariably be someone who’d chime in with having driven it in the 80s for the space shuttle, had to relocate a family of turtles on the road ahead in an unhurried but definite timeframe, always ate some complicated lunch while operating it, etc.
I know we have a launch window, I do, but if this au jus stays dipped one more second it’s going to turn into bread soup and make a mess all over the cab here