UK Spends $2 Million on Electric Cop Cars, Discovers They're Useless for Pursuit
The United Kingdom’s experiment with electric police vehicles has seemingly ended in failure after the cars have been revealed to be practically useless for crucial law enforcement activities.
As the U.K. Daily Mail reported, hundreds of the vehicles have been purchased across the country by different police forces.
The total cost of the green vehicles is almost £1.5 million — nearly $2 million in American currency.
While electric cars have their merits, the technology simply isn’t there for the vehicles to serve as regular parts of police fleets. Despite this, U.K. police forces have fielded over 400 of the green machines.
The cars come from different manufacturers, including BMW and Nissan.
New Electric BMW i3 Range Extender now on patrol in #Westminster, #Greenwich & #Bexley https://t.co/MpGTMB1S6H pic.twitter.com/dnTzvoSJrj
— Metropolitan Police (@metpoliceuk) January 6, 2016
It didn’t take long for officers to discover the downside of these environmentally friendly cruisers.
Systems like automatic braking may help civilian consumers avoid crashes and fender benders, but the advanced sensor network only hinders police chases. The safety system is “not conducive to pursuit or response driving,” the Staffordshire Police reported, according to the Daily Mail.
Other modern safety features, like headlights that are always on while the car is running, render the cruisers practically useless for surveillance and other undercover work.
The vehicles’ range is a central issue as well.
The battery reserves of the cars, which already take an inconveniently long time to charge, can’t even make it through a single shift without the need to be plugged back in.
It seems that these vehicles are still seeing use despite their downsides.
The costly cars are now being used to carry chiefs to and from stations and for other non-emergency work.
Our English-speaking friends across the Atlantic only needed to look to California to find the limitations of “green” police vehicles.
A California police department discovered the downsides of electric pursuit vehicles firsthand when a Tesla Model S ran out of juice halfway through a chase.
Although electric vehicles are not currently advanced enough to replace gasoline- and diesel-fueled law enforcement cars, there’s little doubt that with time this will no longer be the case.
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