Senate Republicans cannot force the U.S. Postal Service to scrap thousands of electric vehicles and charging equipment in a massive tax and budget bill, the Senate parliamentarian said late on Sunday.
The U.S. Postal Service currently has 7,200 electric vehicles, made up of Ford e-Transit vehicles and specially built Next Generation Delivery Vehicles built by Oshkosh Defense.
USPS warned on June 13 that scrapping the electric vehicles would cost it $1.5 billion, including $1 billion to replace its current fleet of EVs and $500 million in EV infrastructure rendered useless and “seriously cripple our ability to replace an aging and obsolete delivery fleet.”
Senate parliamentarian Elizabeth MacDonough, whose role is to ensure lawmakers follow proper legislative procedure, said a provision to force the sale could not be approved via a simple majority vote in the Republican-controlled chamber and will instead need a 60-vote supermajority, according to Democrats on the Senate Budget Committee.
The EV1 was a wildly impractical vehicle with < 100 miles of range that cost $100,000 in 1996 money (over $200,000 today). It was never ever going to be any kind of mass produced consumer vehicle. Without GM subsidizing the ever loving shit out of them the only people who could have afforded them were the ultra wealthy.
Regardless, the only thing political was California’s insanely premature ZEV mandate set to take effect in 1998. That was political but not the EV1 itself.
BTW GM never really gave up on ZEV / PZEV even though most people think they did. I had a most excellent Hybrid Tahoe in the late 2000s but at 55k-ish new in 2009 ($82,000 today) it was simply too damn expensive to be a mass market vehicle. Just like the EV1.