Daily Authority: 📩 USPS EVs

🚀 Good morning! It’s Friyay!

USPS EVs?

Something different for your Friday: “Give the US Postal Service $3 billion to electrify its fleet, you cowards,” writes Gizmodo, as if reading my mind.

I’ve been deep-diving EVs this week and I just don’t know if enough attention is being paid to what’s coming.

• In short: USPS operates 200,000 vehicles, including 165,000 daily trucks, and most are in need of replacement.
• The truck of the future for USPS has the option to be battery-operated, but it seems funding is short to electrify the whole fleet.
• So, the split will be 90/10: just 10% EVs.
• Weirdly, though, the cost to electrify the whole fleet, versus 90/10, would be a $3.3 billion difference from the 90/10 split.
• Total cost: $11.6b versus $8.3b for the 90/10 split.
• $3.3b is not chump change! But it isn’t exactly a huge amount of money for the entire nation served by USPS.

More detail:

• The thing people don’t fully understand about EVs is that they’re inevitable because of just how efficient they are. Take a look at this slide from Auke Hoekstra, a Netherlands-based EV thinker, and senior advisor of smart mobility at the Eindhoven University of Technology.
• “The biggest reason the EV is the future is the engine,” notes Hoekstra, with this table:

• These numbers are wild — you just use so much less energy in an EV, and that energy can be clean.

And back to USPS:

• Quote: “Having 165,000 electric vehicles quietly delivering mail would, according to the EIS, reduce greenhouse gas emissions by more than 537,000 metric tons of direct tailpipe emissions alone. The USPS helpfully notes this would “be the most beneficial” scenario on that front, in addition to cutting air and noise pollution. That would save lives and money, particularly in poor neighborhoods and communities of color.”
• And yes, there are challenges, including, “where to install charging infrastructure in urban locations and having the range for mail delivery in rural areas,” noted the article, though the number of routes that a current EV couldn’t service is estimated to be around 5%.
• But what a shot in the arm it would be for the EV ecosystem.
• And it’s going to happen, eventually, in most cases.

Roundup

• 🔐 No evidence of Xiaomi censorship tools on its phones, says German watchdog (Android Authority).
• 👉 realme 9 Pro renders, specs leak: Two steps forward, one step back? (Android Authority).
• 🏠 The Matter smart home protocol: What is it, and why is it a big deal? (Android Authority).
• 🤔 “How is it that the seven-year-old NVIDIA Shield TV is kept so up to date?” (Android Authority).
• 🔥 Deal: Save 20% on HBO Max for 12 months (Android Authority).
• 📺 Google has an Apple-like plan for Google TV: fitness, smart home capabilities, and more? (Protocol).
• 📱 Google’s Android 12 update has been the rockiest in years: “same old Android — the good and the bad” (The Verge).
• 🚰 Android 13 leaks: More Material You options, opt-in to app notifications (Ars Technica).
• 🔫 Fortnite returns to iPhones, iPads, and Android devices thanks to NVIDIA’s gaming loophole… The web is a fairer place than an app store, but it’s complicated! (Gizmodo).
• ⌚ Activity data from wearables could help monitor blood sugar levels, study indicates (The Verge).
• 🦈 Baby Shark is the first YouTube video to reach 10 billion views, some 2.3b ahead of Despacito (and not the Bieber version) (Engadget).
• 🎮 Game studios are turning play into work(Wired).
• 🌊 I’ve seen everything and this is the best thing I’ve seen today: Wave singularity (r/gifs).
• ☕ “What’s something you look forward to every single day?” (You know my answer…) (r/askreddit)

Friday Fun

This demonstration of latency is pretty great — it’s not perfect, because packet loss is the problem vs ping, but hey:

Stay at a low low ping, friends.

Tristan Rayner, Senior Editor.