GoKawiilNew York City is not a car town. But pay attention as you walk, bike, or, sure, drive around the country’s most populous city, and you might notice a car trend: an increasing number of its vehicles are electric. The city government operates some 5,800 EVs, plus 4,700 hybrid vehicles—Parks Department pickups, Police Department crossover SUVs, school buses, paramedic response vehicles, even some hulking garbage trucks. A local law requires the city to transition its entire light- and medium-duty fleet to batteries by 2035 and its trucks by 2038.
Los Angeles County, a car town, has its own EV goals: 100 percent fleet electrification by 2045, which would require replacing all 20,000 of the fleet’s vehicles. With just 600 electric vehicles and 350 plug-ins so far, officials have plenty of work to do.
So on Thursday, the country’s most-populous city announced it would band together with the country’s most-populous county to form what it hopes is a powerful advocacy bloc for electric vehicles. The “bicoastal bridge,” as officials are calling it, will use their combined purchasing power to push manufacturers to keep up the electric work, even despite the industry’s wider challenges.
But hitting those marks will take some finagling. US vehicle manufacturers simply don’t make electric versions of some of the vehicles the city needs: electric passenger vans, fire department pumper trucks that fit city specifications, and, for New York, snowplows. Electric vehicle charging can still be a pain point—New York operates roughly 2,500 charging ports, making it the state’s largest network, but it will need lots more and solid backup plans if power fails before EVs can expand more widely.
Courtesy of NYC Department of Citywide Administrative Services
The Trump administration’s war on electric cars and the industry's retreat from once-ambitious electrification timelines give local government officials some degree of agita.
“There have been a series of announcements that are concerning to us,” says Keith Kerman, the city’s chief fleet officer and the deputy commissioner of the Department of Citywide Administrative Services, which handles vehicle purchases across the city’s agencies. (Kerman took WIRED’s call from the front seat of a parked Toyota Prius Prime, a plug-in hybrid.) “There are headwinds for electrification in the United States right now.”
The partnership “is really about having the market understand where we’re going so they can actually supply us,” says Quintin Haynes, the chief deputy director of the Los Angeles County Internal Services Department, which handles vehicle purchasing for some 40 agencies across the county.