USPS Chief Executive Officer Louis DeJoy gained notoriety during the recent election for allegedly sabotaging his own agency’s performance in order to suppress mail-in votes.
Workhorse’s EVs are designed for last-mile delivery, and its current customers include UPS and FedEx Express. Shares of Workhorse (Nasdaq: WKHS) dropped more than 50% on the news. The news was a crushing blow to the Workhorse Group, which had proposed an all-electric delivery vehicle, and was seen as the leading contender for the contract. Under the contract’s initial $482-million investment, Oshkosh will finalize the production design of the Next Generation Delivery Vehicle (NGDV), a purpose-built, right-hand-drive vehicle for mail delivery, and will assemble 50,000 to 165,000 of them over 10 years.ĭefying President Biden’s wish to electrify the US government’s vehicle fleet, the USPS announced that the new 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.” Posted Februby Charles Morris & filed under Newswire, The Vehicles.Īfter deliberating about a long-overdue modernization of its vehicle fleet for nearly a decade, the US Postal Service has awarded a 10-year contract to Wisconsin-based Oshkosh Defense to manufacture a new generation of postal delivery vehicles. Workhorse executives were to meet with postal service officials on Wednesday to discuss their decision.Oshkosh beats Workhorse for USPS contract, new vehicles may use fossil fuel powertrains The Biden Administration recently named three members to the Postal Service board that if confirmed would give them the votes Brown said to oust DeJoy. "We don't know if it's a big Trump contributor in Wisconsin but we do know that the Youngstown area was left out and we have a company there that can absolutely do this and I will fight for them,” Brown said. Brown says they want a deeper look into Postmaster General Louis DeJoy's role in the decision. That he argues flies in the face of the original electric intent for the fleet and in the face of the Biden Administration's Executive order on climate change which called for the electric transformation of the entire federal fleet. “They're going to build traditional gas-guzzling vehicles." "The company in Osh Kosh Wisconsin is not going to build electric vehicles,” said Senator Sherrod Brown. Still, when the Postal Service passed on Workhorse in favor of a Wisconsin Company it raised the concerns of lawmakers who called on the Biden Administration to step in. In a statement, the company told News 5 “Lordstown Motors’ business plan was never reliant on Workhorse receiving the USPS contract if they were awarded it, we would’ve loved to have been a part of the production team, but our focus has always been and will always be to build the most cost-effective, safest, zero-emission work vehicles ever made – starting with the over 100,000 Endurances that have been preordered.” Workhorse maintains an ownership stake in Lordstown which would have produced the vehicles. Workhorse and its founder Steve Burns would splinter off to form Lordstown Motors which has begun production of the all-electric pickup Endurance at the plant. "For this really to work it's going to take the contract with the United States Post Office."
"This is probably not the day yet to celebrate,” DeWine said at a news conference that day. It was a tweet that prompted Governor Mike DeWine that day to immediately pump the brakes. Workhorse was thrust into the spotlight on May 8, 2019, when then-President Donald Trump tweeted that Workhorse would be buying the former Lordstown GM Assembly plant, which had closed two years ago this week when the last Chevy Cruze rolled off the line March 6. “That’s why a lot of us thought that Workhorse was in a really good position because out of the top three they were the ones who were really going to go all-in on the electric vehicle.” “I mean it didn’t make any sense,” Ryan said. “I mean this is a huge opportunity that would be missed if we just go back and say we want to do the old school kind of truck.”īut that’s what he says they did in their decision to bypass the all-electric Ohio-built model pitched by the Workhorse Group and going instead with one from a Wisconsin company Oshkosh Defense. “This is an opportunity to transform the postal fleet, to transform the American auto industry to leapfrog other countries with our commitment to electric vehicles and batteries and charging stations,” Ryan said. Postal Service put out a request a few years back for bids to overhaul their aging fleet of vehicles, it was seen as a chance to think big through Congressman Tim Ryan.
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