#ups

Five people in Texas, two of whom work for UPS, have been charged with trafficking cocaine via shipping packages.

UPS, the package delivery company best known for shorts that don’t reach nearly as far down the thigh as its drivers might prefer, wants fewer emissions from its fleet of signature brown delivery vans. It also doesn’t want to pay more for clean vehicles than it has to.

In an announcement Thursday, the company says its partnership with Ohio’s Workhorse Group — a company known for its EV pickup — will yield a delivery truck that doesn’t burn fossil fuels or cost any more than a conventional rig, even without government subsidies. Via a 50-strong fleet of experimental trucks, UPS and Workhorse plan to work out the bugs and create a vehicle for industry-wide adoption.

The United Parcel Service said Tuesday it will purchase 125 all-electric semi trucks from Tesla, surpassing PepsiCo’s order to make it the largest known order for the vehicle thus far. While the purchase isn’t tantamount to UPS making a complete shift to an electric fleet, the company has previously stated it wants to convert up to 1,500 delivery trucks in New York to battery electric units and has been researching non-traditional powertrains for some time.

With so many of its trips taking place between distribution hubs, a medium-range EV truck boasting a high capacity could be a good fit for UPS. At the very least, Tesla seems to think so — the delivery service provided the automaker with extensive data on how its trucks function on real-world routes in order to evaluate how the hulking BEVs might perform in its fleet. Of course, the cooperative experience also helps both companies promote themselves as leaders in the green revolution.

America sits on one of the world’s largest deposits of natural gas, more than enough to make the U.S. independent from the foreign oil imports the electric vehicles failed to avert. While the price of oil goes up, natural gas is now cheaper than 30 years ago. Greenhouse gas emissions from engines powered by natural gas trucks are about 20 percent lower than those powered by gasoline or diesel. One would not notice this at normal “gas” station. Cars and trucks still mostly fuel up the old-fashioned way. A change to natural gas is now brought by UPS.