California is all in on an electric future, planning to ban the sale of gas and diesel powered cars starting in 2035. To get ready for this brave new world some police departments started with buying a few Teslas. These departments immediately ran into serious problems using the vehicles as cruisers, such as a lack of charging infrastructure, inadequate interior space, expensive and lengthy retrofitting processes, interference from advanced driver safety assistance systems and more.
But there is an obvious option here: Don’t use a Tesla. The Fort Bragg Police Department told SFGate using a F-150 Lightning as a patrol vehicle makes a lot more sense.
“Tesla isn’t the right answer in the law enforcement market currently for electric adoption,” Police Department Chief Neil Cervenka told SFGate. “But there might be better options.”
The 3 reasons cited from the article:
- “The car has other issues, namely size. Tesla back seats “only have room for one prisoner,” Crook said, limiting an officer’s ability to sequester suspects.”
- The car doesn’t have an engine block to hide behind to protect from bullets
- If the car is low on charge, it might mean a prisoner has to sit in the back of the car while the car charges instead of sitting in the car while refueling.
edit: There was a 4th reason from the article.
- The belts the officers wear with their gun and tools on it is very uncomfortable as doesn’t fit well in the Tesla seats.
Not sure why number 1 is apparently a thing. My Model 3’s back seat is the same size as any other similarly sized vehicle. So unless the retrofits are somehow inherently different to create that prisoner compartments this shouldn’t be any different than any other sedan.
And 3 isn’t a massive difference either unless you treat charging like filling up a gas tank to full every time and don’t even consider something like a partial charge for only 5 or 10 minutes. It’s just a difference in planning and assumptions, something some people seem to have difficulty with for whatever reason. With a low state of charge, supercharging speeds are extremely fast. You don’t have to sit there and fully charge every time.
Not sure why number 1 is apparently a thing. My Model 3’s back seat is the same size as any other similarly sized vehicle. So unless the retrofits are somehow inherently different to create that prisoner compartments this shouldn’t be any different than any other sedan.
In my mind there is some legitimacy to #1. Police cars I’ve seen install a separate bulkhead between the front and backseats and this usually takes up a LOT of room. I was able to sit in the back of one of the old Ford Crown Victoria converted police cars at a public event. I’m 6’ and could not have my legs straight (my femurs are too long). The back seat of a Model 3 is significantly smaller than a Ford Crown Vic.
Here’s a picture from of an example:
And 3 isn’t a massive difference either unless you treat charging like filling up a gas tank to full every time and don’t even consider something like a partial charge for only 5 or 10 minutes. It’s just a difference in planning and assumptions, something some people seem to have difficulty with for whatever reason. With a low state of charge, supercharging speeds are extremely fast. You don’t have to sit there and fully charge every time.
I don’t have enough information to know how police use cars to offer an opinion on this. If they are constantly in motion, like taxi cabs are, then this could be a legitimate concern. If they are frequently parked and idling, then a near future technology solution of wireless charging could address this.
Are there still Crown Vics anywhere? It seems like most cruisers are now Ford Explorers
Ford replaced the Crown Victoria-based vehicles with Taurus and Explorer based vehicles for model year 2013. The Taurus and its police version were both discontinued in 2019. The Explorer is now Ford’s only offering as a primary police vehicle, but other Ford vehicles are offered as secondary police vehicles including the F-150 Lightning.
Yeah but a model 3 is not a large car. Compare to something like a Crown Vic, the de facto standard for a police cruiser for a long time.
These sound like trumped up justifications from people who don’t want the cars for other reasons.
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I’ve ridden in the back seats of Teslas in Lyfts with my girlfriend. I feel like more than one person can fit in the back seat, since we were able to do so very comfortably. We are both short, so maybe the kind police are concerned about leg room for prisoners?
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How often are these police being shot at?
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Too bad? Don’t get arrested if you don’t want to sit around being bored for 30 minutes while they top up at a fast charger?
Best counters I can figure:
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More an issue of putting a resisting arrestee back there without breaking either them or the car.
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Probably not often, but it is in their job description to respond to active shooters. And the usual bit about them being so bad at deescalatuon that they make things worse.
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I think the concern is less for the detained and more for the patrolling man-hours of the cops themselves. Every minute spent charging is a minute they aren’t reminding the public that there are consequences for standing out.
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They should probably just stick with Ford and GM. Many retrofit kits for their ICE counterparts will already work, and they already have a longstanding relationship with those manufacturers.
GM in particular has some VERY compelling EVs. The Silverado EV has a bonkers amount of range.
GM has already announced the Blazer EV will be offered in a police variant. Ford already offers the F-150 Lightning in a police variant but not as a frontline vehicle, more for secondary operations. It looks like Ford might’ve started testing a Mustang Mach-E police version to compete with the Blazer EV, but it doesn’t look like anything’s official about that yet.
This points more towards Tesla’s unsuitability towards this specific task than towards EVs. However, I find it weird that they say the charging infrastructure is lacking. In CA I can find chargers, especially Tesla chargers, everywhere.
My town’s police department has its own fuel pumps. Maybe they mean their departments haven’t installed chargers yet? If so, that’s not an ev problem but a department provlem
Sounds like an opportunity for one of the auto manufacturers to build an actual EV police cruiser.
City of Pasadena recently switched to Tesla’s we’ll see how that goes.
