According to a police chief, the electric police cars used in rural areas do not allow officers to go to crime scenes, since the batteries of the vehicles are too often dead.
Police are struggling to tackle crime and respond to emergencies in Gloucestershire because their electric vehicles are running out of power, according to Police and Crime Commissioner Chris Nelson. Gloucester Police has the UK’s largest all-electric fleet, with 21% of its 435 vehicles being electric.
Nevertheless, despite a considerable effort to go electric, several agents regret the gradual abandonment of thermal vehicles. ” We have the largest fleet by percentage of size. This caused problems said Chris Nelson, Conservative Policing and Crime Commissioner for Gloucester. Officers driving electric vehicles would have very hard to find chargers in the county.
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The police can no longer fight crime in electric cars
According to the police chief, officers regularly find that their vehicles are running out of power when responding to emergencies in rural areas. Faced with these problems of autonomy, the police now seem more cautious about the idea of continuing the transition to electric. ” The design options available for EVs for operational use may not be as advanced as I would like. So, let’s face it, I’m cautious about going any further down this path at this point. Nelson announces.
” If an officer is in a rural area in a traffic accident and his lights are on, his radio is on, his heater is on, I wouldn’t want him to run out of power for all those equipment, simply because he or she is in an electric car “, he continues. Although they are more efficient than combustion engine cars, electric cars cannot efficiently store the same amount of energy as a tank of gas, and their performance decreases when their batteries heat up during use. Gloucester Police continue to support the environmental benefits of electric vehicles, but cannot forget the effectiveness of their cars in fighting crime.
It therefore seems that the British police will take longer than expected to change their fleet of thermal vehicles. In France, we know that the gendarmerie and the police have started to switch to electric cars since 2020.
Source : The Telegraph
