Does this mean they'll have all the old trucks up for sale? Who wants to start a food truck with me in an old USPS vehicle
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Suspect they will destroy them much as they did the older style postal jeeps towards the end. They are not safe and there is a lot of potential liability in selling them. I think they also want to avoid the situation where people drive around in official looking vehicles that are identified as belonging to the post office.
Also, they are too small to make a decent food wagon.
> potential liability in selling them.
This is a cop-out. Especially when it's the government (notoriously hard to sue) selling. "You couldn't normally sell this stuff to consumers" gets sold on govdeals and ironplanet all the time.
Additionally, the LLVs likely meet applicable NHTSA regulations and FMVSSs for the year they were made and their class of vehicle.
I don't want to start a food truck, but I would like to electrify them and make them into a fleet of leasable UberEats/DoorDash/Prime delivery vehicles
The old mail vans are effectively Chevy S10 pickup chassis with the postal van body on top. Apparently, they are prone to catch on fire randomly.
Would it be street legal to operate a civilian right hand drive vehicle?
Yes, it is. There's a fairly big "JDM" (Japanese Domestic Market) car interest in the US, and I've seen plenty of them registered, insured and driving here. I think getting them emissions certified since the standards are all different is a bigger hurdle when importing than anything else, and that wouldn't apply here.
Edit: Also, the other direction, you'll see a lot of LHD cars in the UK where American troops are deployed. That's a pretty specific loophole, but I remember getting a lot of confused looks driving around.
It's not really a loophole is it? European drivers are welcome to drive LHD cars into UK via boats/channel tunnel just as we can take British cars to the rest of Europe, American troops just happen to be a significant group who take advantage of it being completely legal.
As to the confused looks, I would hazard a guess (having lived near a US base in the past, now not but still see EU cars every day) that they were over your choice of make/model (e.g. a Chevy of a type that no Brits buy), rather than driver side. Maybe I'm wrong and lots of people give weird looks because of the driver side, but personally I've definitely stood staring at cars that looked weird to me and were clearly US imports, but if I see a car that's common in the UK it's not that interesting noticing when there's a foreign version on the road here.
edit: oh and number plates too. American style is obviously much less common than even most old European country styles, yet alone the more standardised versions of the past couple of decades. So even if the model of car is the same, seeing an EU plate you think "they probably drove it from mainland Europe" which is pretty common for holidays, work, or just people relocating and keeping their car, whereas seeing a US plate makes you wonder who cared enough to ship it all the way here.
I guess I used "loophole" because the whole program is a loophole. Typically exempts you from inspections, no international drivers license needed, you buy coupons that relieve the fuel tax, we use weird number plates as you mention (not the ones from home, but military off-duty plates). I had an old LHD Opel Rekord from Germany when I was in the UK, like this one: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opel_Rekord#/media/File:Opel_R...
Mail carriers are civilians. My uncle was a rural carrier and had a right hand drive Suburu stationwagon thing that was his personal car, used for work.
Yeah rural mail carriers have cars due to the longer distances they have to go.
Yep. You can even buy a Wrangler RHD direct from Jeep today. Go to their builder and find the "WRANGLER UNLIMITED RHD".
It's legal, just expensive as all get out to insure I suspect.
just one truck? let's make a fleet. mine's gonna be a mini arcade with three cabinets.