Several Republican representatives have proposed amendments to the National Defense Authorization Act to try to stop the Pentagon’s electrification. The proposals sound so mind-bogglingly dumb that they look like they were written by 19th-century Luddites or the fossil fuel industry itself.
With the US military operating a fleet of hundreds of thousands of vehicles, including tactical vehicles, it makes the Pentagon the largest institutional consumer of fossil fuels in the world.
The entire transportation industry is currently transitioning to electric propulsion, and the US military knows better than to be left behind.
Having some military vehicles mixed in the fleet that are electric would probably make things more robust.
What if the supply lines get cut off and they’re stuck in a part of town in a defensive position.
They’ll eventually run out of gas, but there may be electricity there, or they may have solar panels as part of their kit.
All gas has this problem, all EV has a different problem, but a mix could be more resilient.
Agreed. Also, electric vehicles are also much simpler mechanically speaking. They have fewer moving parts that can break relative to a modern gas engine. In-wheel electric motors wouldn’t need a drive train, and would mean more room for other military stuff in vehicles.
Fueling is also much less volatile and you can gain that electricity with cleaner means and cheaper fuels, ideally nuclear.
If they had to do an emergency airlift supply drop, I wonder if they’d prefer dropping a massive battery vs a pile of gasoline. Although the battery would be more expensive I guess. Like airdrop a Tesla Megapack.
Also that’d be bad if a enemy overran them and then took that asset, so probably bad idea heh
Keep in mind that these proposed amendments would effect every vehicle purchase the military makes, which includes (as the article mentions) domestic fleets of vehicles that the military maintains. This isn’t just about front line war machinery; they’re arguing that EV tech is too experimental to allow the Pentagon to buy EVs for staff cars, or for military bases to use.
🤦♂️
My dad used to work on a military base as a civilian in wastewater treatment plant. Part of his job, about once a day he’d hop in their little public works pickup truck and collect some water samples from a handful of places around the base, check on some gauges at a couple different sites, etc. If I had to guess he logged probably a max of 5 miles on a busy day (and that’s probably a very high estimate) All low speed, pretty sure speed limit around most of the base was like 25mph. He could practically have done his rounds in a power wheels Barbie jeep (and really the little Chevy S10 or whatever they had was probably overkill for their needs, something like a golf cart or kei truck would probably have been plenty)
And except for that maybe hour out of his day he would drive it around, that truck would pretty much just sit.
That would be such an ideal niche for an EV, it’s got like 23 hours to do nothing but charge. Hell, you could probably even charge it off a solar panel, doesn’t take a whole lot of juice to go 5 miles.