NYC and LA Team Up to Fight EVs

It’s a strange time to be an automaker, as federal incentives in the U.S. are ending and support for new electric vehicles is dwindling. “Manufacturers would like to know what the future holds and what the regulations are,” said Mike Finnnern, senior vice president and head of fleet emissions at WSP, a consulting firm. Guarantees of future mega-plans from fleet managers like city governments, as well as private businesses, “will help them stay stable for a while.”

EVs are ideal for government fleets, Finnern says. Research shows that car buyers are always more concerned about moving to plug-in from the cars they’re used to, and want longer-lasting cars, even if they don’t use the full battery. But governments know better how their vehicles are used, can control charging, and can see that today’s 250 to 400-mile trips per charge are meeting their needs. In addition, EVs can help governments save money on fuel and maintenance. Private operators like Amazon are not standing still their displacement in EVsand “they wouldn’t do it if it didn’t turn off the pencil,” he says.

Kerman says: It would protect us from the doubling of oil prices that we are currently enduring. In cooperation with the US Department of Transportation, its agency you have found that switching to battery power would increase New York City’s electricity economy by 6 percent.

However, both governments say they have a lot to learn about how and where EVs can best fit together and that the partnership will help them share and develop best practices for other cities to follow.

One of the main things that the government has done and what the government has done so far is that the authorities need to be active and careful to get the people who work in the city on board. There are technical challenges—maintenance workers need to be retrained to maintain EVs instead of gas-powered cars, and everyone has to remember to plug them in—as well as more difficult behaviors.

Employees don’t always appreciate sudden changes. And when New York data points out that the smart support built into its new EVs will reduce speeding and possibly damage to the city’s traffic, workers often worry about monitoring at work. (In March, the city workers union they agreed explaining how data collected from city traffic can be used for disciplinary purposes.)

Employees interested in EVs can make all the difference. “We’ve seen some deployments be successful and others, not so much. They have the same problems, but some were able to overcome them because their people were excited and trained,” says Finnern.

Courtesy of the California Internal Services Department

Haynes, who worked with Kerman in New York before moving to Los Angeles, remembers being skeptical about EVs at first but changed his mind after Kerman convinced him to give Tesla a try. It was, above all, fun.

“I’ll tell you, nobody gets into these electric cars, and gets out and says, ‘I hate this car,'” says Kerman. They all say, ‘I love the car.