Gabe's Collision North

30 U.S. Cities Discuss Purchasing More Electric Vehicles

In the past, new federal policies have been created to reduce vehicular emissions of carbon dioxide. Now that this topic has come back into the conversation, states are buying more and more electric cars every day. At Gabe's Collision North, we recently found this news piece and decided to share it with our readers in Buffalo and all over the State of NY.

Currently, a cooperative of 30 cities in the country are talking seriously about purchasing a large number of electric cars for their municipal fleets. By buying them in a group, they will be saving a huge amount of money and that's why cities all over the U.S. are leveraging their purchasing power to go all-in with electric cars.

The cities have jointly put together a deal with carmakers for 114,000 cars, to be split among them. Those cars would augment and in many cases replace thousands of old existing cars and light trucks that are currently in state fleets.

The deal could be worth a grand total of $10 billion, and would be equal to 72% of all U.S. plug-in electric-car sales that happened last year, according to Bloomberg.

This joint-purchase project is led by the City of Los Angeles  and includes other major players like New York and Chicago. Currently, cities are only asking for proposals from car manufacturers to supply the anticipated volume of vehicles.

Most of the vehicles will likely be light-duty cars and light-duty trucks, but some municipalities are reportedly inquiring about vehicle types that might not be current available with electric powertrains, like fire engines, for instance.

The demand for cities to upgrade their fleets with bigger numbers of electric cars has been gradually building. In 2014, the City of Indianapolis unveiled plans to convert its whole fleet to electric by 2025.

In 2015, New York City announced an initiative to add a total of 2,000 electric cars to its fleet that same year. Los Angeles is already in the process of acquiring 160 battery-electric vehicles and 128 plug-in hybrids for several city agencies.

Earlier this year, L.A. joined with Seattle, San Francisco, and Portland requested a comprehensive proposal from several automakers about a potential order for 24,000 electric cars, to be equally distributed between all four.

U.S. cities are starting to recognize the benefits of electricity-powered fleets, so we can expect to see less gas-powered and more electric vehicles in the near future.

Sources: Green World, MSN and Forbes