The US Government's Entire 645,000-Vehicle Fleet Will Go All-Electric

Jalopnik reports:
The United States government operates a fleet of about 645,000 vehicles, from mail delivery trucks to military vehicles and passenger cars. On Monday, President Joe Biden announced that his administration intends to replace them all with American-made, electric alternatives...

In 2015, the government operated 357,610 gasoline vehicles and 3,896 electric ones; in 2019, those numbers grew to 368,807 and 4,475, respectively. That's excluding the tens of thousands of E-85 ["flex fuel"] and diesel-based vehicles on the road, which, together, comprise nearly a third of the 645,047 total. So, yeah, there's certainly a lot of work to do...

The Washington Post reports:
The declaration is a boon to the fledgling electric vehicle industry, which has grown exponentially in the past decade but still represents less than 2 percent of automobiles sold in the United States... "It's important as a symbolic thing," said Timothy Lipman, co-director of the Transportation Sustainability Research Center at the University of California at Berkeley. "But I think it also will have a way of helping to jolt the industry forward at a time when it kind of needed that...."

One of the biggest issues: Just three automakers currently manufacture electric vehicles in the United States, and none of those cars meet Biden's criteria of being produced by union workers from at least 50 percent American-made materials. The closest is the Chevrolet Bolt, assembled at a General Motors plant in Lake Orion, Michigan. But most of that car's parts — including the battery, motor and drive unit — are produced overseas. But that could easily change, said Kristin Dziczek, vice president of industry, labor and economics at the nonprofit Center for Automotive Research.

If Biden succeeds in making every car in the federal fleet electric, he would increase the total number of electric vehicles in the United States by more than 50 percent. "One of the big questions for companies is, 'Is the consumer there?' Well, [the government] is a big consumer," Dziczek said. "Now they know there's some solid demand from the government to support their early launches of new vehicles...." With 640,000 nonelectric vehicles, the federal fleet represents the annual output of about three or four automotive plants, Dziczek said. That's not exactly the million jobs Biden promised in his announcement Monday. But it might be sufficient to convince car manufacturers to change their supply chains or shift their production to U.S. facilities.

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