I genuinely feel bad for my local delivery drivers. We have a couple in our family that work at one of the major shippers and I promise you, that ever since Thanksgiving they have been in the middle of their hell season. Trailers upon trailers, truck upon truck, filled to the brim with boxes of everything from expensive and fragile gifts that have sent credit cards all over deep into the red, to bags of cat litter to prepare the house sitter for when everybody piles into the SUV to go to Gramma and Grandpa’s for the traditional Christmas feast. For everyone that’s off on holiday, there’s two that are busing their hump to make sure that the holiday is a good one. Don’t forget them when it comes to the holiday season. (No joke, I got a Christmas card from my trash truck driver this morning…they don’t forget you!)
But look at what they are driving with pity. Great big cargo haulers, Sprinter vans, and in the case of some remote delivery drivers, whatever rental van was available that the company was able to get at short notice for the holiday influx. Hardly the kind of thing we’d want to be seen in. And don’t get us started on the U.S. Postal Service…the ubiquitous Grumman LLV is a sad little box-hauler and on our rural routes, we get people driving LHD cars while sitting in the right seat. We don’t even get JDM or Euro-spec Jeeps or other options.
For the holiday season, we’d like some kind of wildness for those who have to be out moving someone’s family order of Snuggies and ugly sweaters. The flamed, chopped UPS van is bitchin, and an LLV slammed on it’s nuts on air ride would be pretty bad-ass too. It’d be even better if the LLV, which is a first-gen Blazer frame, sported a small-block swap. It’s not Santa’s sleigh on your roof, but what kind of ride would you like the delivery driver to pull up to your house in?
My local UPS driver has one of the longer trucks. It also has an 8.1L GM big block with dual 3″ exhaust. A friend just retired from there driving this truck so I got a close look before he did. The poor mailman (or woman) is out as late as 7pm and on Sundays!
One more reason to hate Amazon. Sunday for USPS is Amazon only, from what our weekday guy told us.
A vehicle that will go down my driveway without breaking branches off the trees along the driveway!
Cool, but if you’re delivering wholesale shit to dunghole citiies like NYC, where bouncing off double-parked cars on already narrow, one-way streets is somewhat the norm (we had a collection of mirrors in our Gruman’s glove cavern), driving something that nice would kind of suck. And if any of you naysayers think it wrong, I had more than one NYC Blue give me thumb’s up after I hit a pothole and the unavoidable, couple inch shimmy sent me into the sode of some illlegally parked, asshat. They hated those fools as much as we did. And NYFD was even better at the mirror game than we were.
Usually he’s rollin down the road in some cold blue steel with a bluesman in the back and a beautician at the wheel…. I believe they are Nationwide…
A Mk1 Ford Transit on air bags with a Coyote motor and transmission and banded steel wheels…
I want them driving something as small as practical, cheap to run, cheap to maintain, and cheap to buy.
I figure I’m paying shipping cost for stuff that they’re delivering, and I’m therefore buying and maintaining those rigs. With shipping costs as insanely high as they are, I’d rather not spend the money on fancy trucks. Spend the money on the drivers, if anything.