Electric postal trucks—brilliant, right? Just like public transport, they run the same predictable routes every day of their mechanical lives. That means fleet managers know exactly what each vehicle will be doing ten Tuesdays from now. So they buy massive, expensive batteries—custom-sized to fit that known workload, because “efficiency.” What they tend to forget, though, is that lithium doesn’t age gracefully. The decay starts from the first charge—small at first, but relentless. Capacity dips. Range shrinks. And one day, sooner than the spreadsheets predicted, the truck can’t finish its route. Not part of it. Not “most” of it. The full loop or nothing—and now it’s nothing. This failure was perfectly foreseeable. But nobody planned for the obvious, because belief in the tech was stronger than basic operational sense.
