City Of LA Workers Will Be Driving Electric BMWs

[Initech]

Most public employees would never dream of driving a BMW -- at least on the job.

But that's what going to be happening in Los Angeles, thanks to deal to lease 100 of BMW's small i3 electric cars in a bid to enhance the city's sustainability efforts.

The Los Angeles Police Department has taken out a three-year lease on the the fleet. It will pay $387 per month per car, including maintenance. It gets cheaper yet: Since they are electric cars, there will be no gasoline costs and as part of the deal, a company called Greenlots is supplying chargers.

Even though the leased i3s are BMWs, city and BMW officials went to lengths to dispute that, at least in this case, they would be considered luxury cars.

"Other car manufacturers competed, they couldn’t beat the price," said Vartan Yegiyan, director of police transportation for the police department, at a press conference near police headquarters to show off the fleet."So BMW did do their homework and they wanted to sell the cars."

The cars will be driven by detectives and police staff, often for follow-ups to criminal cases. Those workers still expect to get plenty of use from the cars, up to 10,000 miles per car a year. They won't be used as black-and-white patrol cruisers. And they say they're hoping to get electric-powered patrol cars in the next few years.

http://www.msn.com/en-us/money/companies/la-city-workers-will-be-driving-bmws/ar-AAgOMpb

This wouldn't be my first choice if going electric but this is definitely a good thing here to ditch the gas guzzlers!

[SoCalNative]

1. People make too much of these luxury brands

in Europe, buses, delivery vehicles and taxis are mostly Mercedes. There are even Tesla taxis here in the Netherlands.

[muntrv]

2. Chevy Volt not good enough?

[Initech]

3. Gas + maintenance

Two things that the BMW does not have that the Volt does.

[pstokely]

4. what's the maintenance cost of a Prius?

besides battery replacement at 100,000 miles?

[JustABozoOnThisBus]

5. I think their police motorcycle fleet is also BMW

[Lee-Lee]

6. I have some serious reservations about an all-electric car for police use

Last edited Fri Jun 10, 2016, 07:46 AM - Edit history (1)

Particularly for patrol cars as it said they want to do soon.

I know several times when we had big emergencies we had cars running 24-48-72 hours nonstop. The County sent maintenance crews around with a fuel truck to refill those of us who couldn't get to a working gas station. If you have an all electric fleet that kind of surge to get as many patrol cars out and working doesn't work out as they need time and special charging stations. And if they ever see a big earthquake that disrupts the grid there you would have no working patrol cars in short order- you can truck in gasoline for emergency services vehicles easy enough but you can't just swap the batteries on these for one with a fresh charge.

I think a gas or diesel electric hybrid is much better suited for emergency services use at this stage of the technology.

[Chan790]

7. Actually, none of these concerns are of actual concern.

You can actually truck in electricity for them. You just use a truck-based generator attached to a quick-charger like this one in CT.


(That one, not that you can see it, is actually powered not by the grid but by a large battery underground, under the unit, charged by solar panels on a "tree" next to the unit.)

It's not as fast as filling up with gasoline, the EV CT "quick" chargers take about 30-45 minutes to fully charge the battery, where the trade-off is shorter battery life...but it's manageable with charge-scheduling. You can also put just enough charge in them to drive them back to the depot in about 3-5 minutes.

The problem you are concerned with...is, quite frankly, not a problem.

[Lee-Lee]

8. 30-45 minutes is still too much down time in those situations

I've worked shifts where we had call backed up so bad my 18 hour shift turned into a 15 and I was always eneoute to the next call before as soon as I cleared the first. I ate granola bars and whatever I carried in the car running between calls and my longest stops were bathroom breaks. Quite often I drive 300-400 miles a shift and my personal most in one shift was 650.

Quite often taking a patrol car out of service 30-45 minutes just isn't an option. If you have 10 cars that's like losing an entire car for an 8 hour shift, as opposed to gas refueling at 3 minutes that would be like losing it for 30 minutes. For day to day operations it's manageable, but not when emergency strikes and you need all hands out working.

Plus your portable generator configured with charging stations is idealistic at best. How many of those exist? In there is a major earthquake how many of those are available within the first 12 hours when they will be needed? If cars are working important duties fuel delivered to them and they can be fueled on-scene, whereas a charging trailer would have to be stationary and have the cars come to it, meaning even more out of service time.

When they can get recharge towns down under 10 minutes it may become workable.

[Chan790]

9. Answers.

*That's why you need to charge schedule...it's less ideal than gasoline, but if they're committed to going the EV route...and it seems they are...then it's something they need to account in and will, probably by buying additional cars so they can afford to have them out of service for charge-time. If they go with partial charges, times are already under 10 minutes...they'd just have to charge more often and it will shorten battery-life.

*Not many exist (They do already make them, primarily for use as portable electrical-generation for emergency response command centers...conversion to chargers is neither expensive or difficult), but there is no current demand outside of specialized areas; nobody has electric emergency-response vehicles. It's not future science, it's not impossible or ever difficult...it's the mobile equivalent of a charger, much like your aforementioned fuel truck. The electricity truck is no less mobile...the entire unit is self-contained: charger unit, gasoline generator, electrical-storage, transformer...they're built on the same frames as oil-tankers and run on diesel engines because the cargo-load is too heavy for an electric vehicle. The fact that the truck runs on diesel is actually the bigger issue I see. You drive it to the car needing charge...you charge and both vehicles drive away.

*How many will be available? I'd assume if they're going to an EV fleet, they're already buying at-least one. Assume they buy two, and now that they have an electric fleet, it encourages other towns nearby to do the same and they buy 1...and so on. Unless you're NYC, you're not going to need more than 10 total for a large city and I'd expect that within 3 years, there will be 5 in the area...so you'd need to bring in at-most 5 more while the local trucks pull heavier duty until they arrive. Considering that in most disasters of the kind you're talking about already necessitate that supplies and material are brought in on truck-convoys, it's just 5 more trucks in the convoy.