Get Ready for Tesla Cops

Police officers are falling in love with electric cars.

By Matteo Wong of The Atlantic

At a rally this past April in Michigan, surrounded by a cadre of law-enforcement officials, Donald Trump suddenly began railing against electric cars. President Joe Biden’s decision to support EVs, he decried, “is one of the dumbest I’ve ever heard.” Minutes later, he was back to praising the sheriffs behind him: “We have to get law and order back. These are the best people in the world,” he said to a smattering of applause.

Support for law enforcement and skepticism of electric cars both abound on the right. Police officers are more likely to identify as Republican than the communities they serve, and their unions widely endorsed Trump in 2020. Meanwhile, the Americans buying electric cars tend to be Democratic. And yet, more and more law-enforcement officers seem to be taken by EVs. When they “get into and experience the [electric] cars firsthand themselves,” Tony Abdalla, a sergeant with the South Pasadena Police Department, told me, “they’re like, Okay, I think I get it now.”

Last month, South Pasadena’s police department became the first in the country with a fully electric police fleet, replacing all of its gas-powered vehicles with 20 Teslas. Four officers, after test-driving Teslas for the department, have already bought one for personal use, Abdalla, who leads his department’s EV-conversion project, told me. South Pasadena is one among a growing number of law-enforcement agencies that are electrifying their fleets. About 50 miles south, the Irvine Police Department just became likely the country’s first to purchase a Tesla Cybertruck. Departments in at least 38 states have purchased, tested, or deployed fully electric cars. Electric patrol cars are not yet legion and in many cities are likely less common than EVs among the general population, but their ranks are growing. They now prowl the streets in Eupora, Mississippi; Cary, North Carolina; and Logan, Ohio.

The nation’s switch to battery-powered police cruisers isn’t only, or even primarily, about the environment. In many cases, they are proving to simply be the best-performing and most cost-effective option for law enforcement. Police departments require vehicles that have rapid acceleration and deceleration; space for radios, sirens, and other special equipment; and extreme reliability for 24-hour emergency responses. When the South Pasadena police first looked into electrification, in the mid-2000s, no EVs on the market could handle the heavy workload that law enforcement demands. The last thing any police officer needs is to worry about their car running out of charge mid-shift. When Tesla unveiled the Model Y in 2019, Abdalla said, it “perked us up.” The model’s range, safety, and power made it the first EV that appeared potentially suitable for the department.

Five years later, the cars have gotten much better. New EVs can regularly drive upwards of 200 or 300 miles per charge, plenty for many officers. Multiple companies help modify Teslas with the necessary equipment to turn them into patrol cars, and both Ford and Chevy market EVs specifically for police use. And from a performance perspective, EVs are appealing for law enforcement because they are typically more powerful than gas-powered cars. The acceleration can verge on the absurd—an electric Hummer pickup truck, which weighs nearly 10,000 pounds, can go from zero to 60 miles per hour about as quickly as a Formula 1 race car. The reason is simple: Whereas combustion engines have to transfer energy from a series of explosions through the transmission and then to the wheels, electric motors instantly begin spinning the tires.

An annual vehicle test by the Michigan State Police precision-driving unit, which is used by departments across North America to gauge a car’s suitability for police use, found last year that the Chevy Blazer EV and the Ford Mustang Mach-E accelerated from zero to 100 miles per hour in roughly 11 seconds, about half the time of many popular gas-powered police cars. On a highway patrol, improved acceleration means catching up to other cars more quickly and risking fewer accidents, says Nicholas Darlington, the Michigan State Police precision-driving unit’s commander. If a suspect is fleeing in a high-end EV, a gas-powered pursuit vehicle might just not be able to catch up: There are numerous videos of police cars struggling to keep pace with Teslas on real and controlled roads.

An EV is typically more expensive up front than a gas-powered car, but police departments offset those costs by not needing to fuel up. The South Pasadena PD expects to save $4,000 a year per EV on fuel alone, Abdalla said. EVs also require less maintenance than gas cars do, compensating for higher sticker costs. After factoring in maintenance and other savings, the operational costs of the city’s Teslas could be half the price per mile driven. New York City, which has one of the largest police fleets in the world, now has roughly 200 EVs, and citywide has “achieved probably 60 to 70 percent maintenance savings in our existing electric fleet,” Keith Kerman, NYC’s chief fleet officer, told me. The most expensive and time-consuming repairs, combustion-engine and transmission replacements, are wholly unnecessary for EVs, he added, meaning the cars can more consistently stay on the road and free up mechanics.

Todd Bertram, the police chief in Bargersville, Indiana, told a local news site that the department’s 13 Teslas are leading to roughly $80,000 in savings on fuel costs, freeing the agency up to hire two additional officers. “For us, it was primarily an operational decision,” Abdalla said. “We got a much better-performing fleet that cost significantly less to maintain and fuel. It saves taxpayers money.”

EVs don’t make the best police cars in every situation. Some departments that have piloted Teslas have determined that they are too small for regular police work. Range is another concern: South Pasadena is a relatively small municipality in which officers are unlikely to drive more than 60 miles in any given 12-hour shift, Abdalla told me. In New York City on a triple shift, an EV battery’s range might not cut it, which is why the NYPD operates more than 2,000 hybrids, Kerman told me. Chargers are much slower than refueling a gas tank, and there are still not enough of them. EVs may not always be practical for state troopers or highway-patrol officers, who may have to drive long distances over roads without much of an EV-charging infrastructure.

As more officers are seen patrolling highways and parks, making traffic stops and arrests, and idling on street corners in Teslas, electric pickup trucks, and battery-powered SUVs, more Republicans may give EVs a chance. “Given the high trust Republicans have in law enforcement, it’s possible that those who were once skeptical of EVs could have a more favorable impression of these products once they see law enforcement using them,” Mike Murphy, who runs the EV Politics Project, an advocacy group dedicated to getting Republicans to adopt EVs, told me over email.

That will not be the case everywhere—if police cars aren’t labeled as electric, for instance, people may not notice them, Loren McDonald, an EV consultant, told me over email. In some places, the effect of electric police cruisers might even dissuade more drivers: “Pushing for EVs using climate-change arguments … would further alienate GOP politicians and voters who have a polarized and entrenched view on climate change,” Murphy said.

Right now, electric cars might actually be more divisive than law enforcement. Some recent polling suggests that Republicans and Democrats may be more closely aligned in their confidence in the police than in how they view EVs. GOP politicians might even prevent police departments, along with other government agencies, from buying EVs, as Republican legislators attempted to do in Kentucky earlier this year. Defunding the police is already a controversial idea; defueling the police may turn out to be as well.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Matteo Wong is a staff writer at The Atlantic.