Electric Vehicles

SAVANNAH, Ga. —

The Biden administration has made a commitment to expand the United States electric vehicle fleet to combat climate change.

White House Climate Advisor Gina McCarthy sat down with WJCL for an exclusive interview to say how this plan will affect people in the low country.

“We’ll start manufacturing the batteries in the U.S.,” said McCarthy. “I know there are two new battery factories that are actually going to put lots of people to work, which is confirmation that a clean energy future can really drive job growth in the country.”

One of those battery manufacturers is in Georgia, near Athens.

“If we address climate as an opportunity for us to grow the jobs of today, the good union high paying jobs, that will bring us stability, that will get those 9 million people that lost their jobs back on the payroll again,” she said.

The Savannah City Council addressed the prospect of expanding their electric vehicle fleet in a work session earlier this week.

“We’re bringing in 21 new electric vehicles. We got 91 hybrids coming in as well,” said Savannah Sustainability Director Nick Deffley. “So just starting to make the fleet more efficient reduce our carbon footprint.”

Which makes Savannah ahead of the curve of the White House in terms of expanding its electric vehicle fleet.

“It’s just reaffirming,” said Deffley. “That yes Savannah was already on the right track back in March of last year.”

DETROIT — For President Joe Biden to reach his ambitious goal of slashing America’s greenhouse gas emissions in half by 2030, huge reductions would have to come from somewhere other than one of the worst culprits: Auto tailpipes.

That’s because there are just too many gas-powered passenger vehicles in the United States — roughly 279 million — to replace them in less than a decade, experts say. In a typical year, automakers sell about 17 million vehicles nationwide. Even if every one of the new ones were electric, it would take more than 16 years to replace the whole fleet.

What’s more, vehicles now remain on America’s roads for an average of nearly 12 years before they’re scrapped, which means that gas-fueled vehicles will predominate for many years to come.

“We’re not going to be able to meet the target with new-car sales only,” said Aakash Arora, a managing director with Boston Consulting Group and an author of a study on electric vehicle adoption. “The fleet is too big.”

So unless government incentives could somehow persuade a majority of Americans to scrap their cars and trucks and buy electric vehicles, reducing tailpipe emissions by anything close to 50% would take far longer than the Biden timetable. Last year, fewer than 2% of new vehicles sold in the United States were fully electric.

“If every new vehicle sold today was an electric vehicle and it was entirely powered by renewable energy overnight, it would take 10 years or more for us to achieve a 50% reduction in greenhouse gas emissions,” said Chris Atkinson, a professor of mechanical engineering and director of smart mobility at Ohio State University.

Which means that other sectors of the economy would have to slash greenhouse gas emissions deeply enough to make up the shortfall in the auto industry.

Transportation as a whole, which includes not only cars and trucks but also ships and airplanes, is the single largest source of such pollution. Of the nearly 6.6 million metric tons of carbon dioxide that were emitted in the United States in 2019, transportation produced 29%. Next was electricity generation at 25%. Then came factories at 23%, commercial and residential buildings at 13% and agriculture at 10%.

Electricity generation is the most likely source of faster reductions. That sector has already made major strides. Last year, carbon emissions from electricity generation were 52% lower than the government had projected they would be in 2005, according to government’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. The reasons: More use of natural gas, solar and wind power, as well as reduced demand as the economy has evolved to achieve gains in energy efficiency.

Biden, who unveiled his goals at a climate summit with world leaders Thursday, has yet to detail the greenhouse gas reductions that his administration envisions for each sector of the economy. Overall, the reductions are intended to limit global warming as part of the president’s vision of a nation that produces cutting-edge batteries and electric cars, a more efficient electrical grid and caps abandoned oil rigs and coal mines.

Gina McCarthy, Biden’s top climate adviser, appeared to signal Thursday that deeper cuts in emissions would have to come from sectors other than the auto industry to reach the goals. She defended the administration’s decision not to set a specific deadline for ending sales of new gas-powered cars or for achieving net-zero emissions from the transportation sector.

“We have a whole lot of ways” to cut U.S. greenhouse gas emissions in half without a transportation goal,” McCarthy said.

For the transportation sector, the government says it will improve vehicle efficiency, invest in low-carbon renewable fuels and produce transit, rail and bicycling improvements. The administration also wants to convert the 650,000-vehicle federal vehicle fleet to battery power.

To increase sales of electric vehicles, the administration plans to spend $15 billion to build a half-million charging stations by 2030, as well as offer unspecified tax credits and rebates to cut the cost.

Swapping the entire fleet of gas burners for electric vehicles could take even longer than 20 years. Todd Campau, associate director of automotive for IHS Markit, estimates that the number of mostly gas-powered vehicles on U.S. roads, will keep growing — to 284 million by 2025.

“The situation is only getting worse as far as the volume that needs to be exchanged,” Campau said.

He and others say it would take highly attractive government incentives to lure additional people out of their gas-burners — something like a reprise of the 2009 cash-for-clunkers program proposed by Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer of New York, but on a vastly larger scale. The Schumer plan proposes rebates of at least $3,000 for people to scrap combustion vehicles for electrics.

Bill Hare, director of Climate Analytics, a Berlin-based climate think tank, predicted that pollution reductions in the transportation sector will come after 2030 as the electric vehicle fleet grows.

“What you would then end up seeing is more or less complete decarbonization of the transport sector — but by 2050,” he said.

Even if tailpipe emissions can’t be cut quickly, Biden’s goals can be reached with significant cuts in electric powerplant emissions as well as reductions in methane pollution from oil wells and cuts in hydrofluorocarbons used in refrigeration and air conditioning, said Kate Larsen, director at Rhodium Group, a research firm. Studies show that electric power emissions can be cut 80% by 2030 with a mix of investment and regulations, Larsen said.

“That will get us the bulk of the way,” she said. “We won’t see 50% reductions across the board.”

Zero emissions electric generation sets the stage for converting cars and many other pollution sources to electricity, she said.

Even countries that are ahead of the U.S. in electric vehicle adoption, mainly in Europe and China, estimates are that sales still won’t put enough electric vehicles in use to reach 2030 carbon dioxide reduction goals, according to a Boston Consulting report. In Europe, which has strong incentives and strict pollution limits, the market share of battery-only and plug-in hybrids jumped from 3% to 10.5% last year. That’s far from enough.

“If half of new cars sold around the world in 2035 are zero-emission vehicles, 70% of the vehicles on roads will still be burning gasoline or diesel,” the report said.

Faster adoption could be limited, too, by a lack of factory capacity to make batteries. The U.S., for instance, has only four plants that are either built or in the works. It would need 50 to electrify the entire fleet, said OSU’s Atkinson.

Even so, a switch from internal combustion to electric vehicles is well under way, and Boston Consulting says it will accelerate. The company foresees new plug-in hybrid and battery electric vehicle sales rising from 12% of the global market in 2020 to 47% in 2025. It notes that battery costs are falling and automakers plan to introduce 300 new EV models by 2023, giving consumers a huge array of choices.

“There’s a path for this to move quite quickly,” said Nathan Niese, an author of the Boston Consulting report. “Business is moving in that direction. The government can just be the accelerator on top of that.”

————

AP Science Writer Seth Borenstein contributed to this report from Washington.

[Stay on top of transportation news: Get TTNews in your inbox.]

The one constant thing — in any industry — is change. Dealers and other fleet-­servicing shops are coming to terms with the growing shift toward electric fleet vehicles. If enough truck dealerships are slow to adopt, “it may slow down the rollout or it may lead to another service model, such as through third parties or national service chains,” said Mike Roeth, executive director for the North American Council for Freight Efficiency.

Tyler Robertson, CEO of Diesel Laptops, which provides diagnostic software and hardware, called the transition an interesting opportunity for his company and independent repair shops.

He said his shop has been approached by more than one company that makes electric trucks — more startup situations versus the traditional OEMs. “They are basically saying, ‘We need a great support network of people who are trained and competent to fix our trucks as they go across the country,’ ” Robertson noted. “They need training on high voltages, the right diagnostic tools.”

Meanwhile, Thomas Healy, founder and CEO of Hyliion Corp., a startup truck maker that is now publicly traded, suggested there may be more of a modular process with servicing the components key to electric vehicles than in-house repairs — such as with Hyliion’s Class 8 Hypertruck ERX model that uses natural gas to power a generator to charge the batteries, along with regenerative braking.

“A couple of years ago we transitioned our model to battery packs that are all fully sealed off and don’t get serviced in the field,” he said. “If there is a battery issue, you do a full battery pack replacement, a component replacement. You don’t try to fix parts, you just replace them. Then we ship them to headquarters here in Texas and we fix them.”

He thinks the whole industry will evolve that way. If an inverter fails, you are not going to ask a technician at a service center to open it up and look at the circuit boards and try to fix it, Healy said. Swapping out parts, he added, is something technicians know how to do already.

“We are just going to have to educate them on, as opposed to swapping out an air filter, you are now going to swap out an inverter, and it is going to have two plugs on it, one high voltage one low voltage,” Healy said. “Then you are going to have nuts and bolts that hold it down on rubber washers, rubber grommets.”

Want more news? Listen to today’s daily briefing below or go here for more info:

 

In a video from REE Automotive, a startup out of Israel, its marquee product acts like an automobile, swerving around traffic cones and over bumps. But crucial stuff is missing. No doors or windows, no steering wheel, no fenders or brake pedals. It’s just a board with wheels.

Yet it is a four-wheeled, self-powered vehicle with the ability to accelerate, brake and steer. So it’s an automobile. Or is it?

This is one of the unsettling questions raised by REE, which identifies its product as simply the “corners.” The idea is to provide a platform upon which others can build EVs and autonomous vehicles.

“We’ve taken everything that makes the car go — the motor, the suspension, the drivetrain, the steering, the braking and the control — and put it in the space between the chassis and the wheel,” said CEO Daniel Barel.

Beyond the strangeness of REE’s invention looms another question with profound implications for industry and economy: Does REE’s automotive platform make it an automaker?

An electric car is relatively simple to put together, because it has drastically fewer parts than an internal combustion engine. That fact is starting to revolutionize how they are manufactured. Since the automotive industry began, vehicles mostly have been made in one way: in a big, complex factory by a big, singular company that oversees it all and gets to put its logo on the grille.

But it might not stay that way for long.

Realizing that the automotive industry is undergoing a once-in-a-century disruption, a jumble of startups and big technology companies are piling in.

They are betting that an electric car can be just another gadget — a large and long-lived one, to be sure, but one that could be assembled from off-the-shelf modules, branded with a celebrated name, and made an extension of the technology ecosystems that have already claimed people’s desks, homes and pockets.

Even the traditional automakers have started to use the lexicon. The chassis; battery; and critical steering, braking and suspension of an EV is the “skateboard.” The stuff built on top of it, to mix a metaphor, is the “top hat.”

“I think what you’re going to see is people contracting for that skateboard platform and building whatever else on top of that,” said Michelle Krebs, the senior director of automotive relations at Cox Automotive.

A scrambling of the manufacturing process would mean yet more discomfort for the $3 trillion global automotive industry. Green government mandates and new technology are catalyzing a mass migration to electric, connected and eventually driverless cars. At the same time, new EV makers could take the initiative out of Big Auto’s hands and steal customers and profits.

Inventing these new vehicles is so expensive — and uncertain and unprofitable — that big names in the auto industry are already pooling their resources. Two of the biggest partnerships are between General Motors Co. and Honda Motor Co., and between Volkswagen AG and Ford Motor Co.

And that’s apart from the coming changes to manufacturing. Today, the question of who owns the electric car future is usually framed as a choice between big legacy companies, like GM, or a new (but still big) manufacturer like Tesla Inc.

But what if the answer is none of the above?

Could the “top hat” — and the badge on the hood — belong to Apple Inc., which is rumored to be hunting for a manufacturer? Could it be Amazon.com Inc., which has partnered with Rivian to make an electric delivery truck? Or could it be Chinese tech heavyweights with names like Xaomi Corp., Baidu Inc. or Huawei Technologies Co. Ltd.?

And who will build the skateboard underneath? Will it be traditional automakers like Volkswagen, which is baking the offering into its business plan? Could it be Foxconn, the Taiwanese maker of the iPhone, which is expanding into automaking? Could it be REE Automotive and its corners?

Any one of these or others could be “a dominant player in getting EVs to market,” said Michael Dunne, a former executive in Asia for J.D. Power and GM and an expert on the Chinese auto industry.

In the last few months, a string of announcements and rumors are starting to blur the lines. Traditional automakers, the economic pillars of national economies, are considering new roles as skateboard makers. Little-known phone suppliers want to tackle the highway. Tech companies are striving to be big auto brands.

The electric platform could spur a disruption like one that transformed the world earlier this century.

“We can do with cars,” Dunne added, “what we did with phones.”

From Henry Ford to Tesla juggernaut

Since the early 20th century, when Henry Ford perfected the assembly line, nearly all the world’s cars have been made the same way: a big company operating big factories that churn out hundreds of thousands of units a year.

“Only a select set of companies around the world had the wherewithal to make vehicles because it was so expensive and involved so many parts,” Dunne said.

Occasionally those behemoths have made exceptions.

Contract manufacturing has been employed for niche vehicles where the profits didn’t justify setting up a new production line. The leading name is Magna Steyr AG & Co. KG, an Austrian manufacturer. It has made luxury sedans for BMW, the Supra sports car for Toyota Motor Corp. and recently the electric I-PACE for Jaguar. (It also just signed a memorandum of understanding with REE Automotive.)

Other times, competing automakers have joined forces in a particular factory to make two or more cars that are nearly identical, with most customers none the wiser.

“You badge yours and I badge mine” is how Laurie Harbour describes it. Harbour is the CEO of Harbour Results Inc., an automotive and manufacturing consultancy.

Such partnerships have been a learning experience for both.

For example, when GM and Toyota joined forces to build the New United Motor Manufacturing Inc., or NUMMI, plant in the 1980s in Northern California, both companies got something. Toyota learned from GM how to succeed as a new entrant in the U.S. market. GM learned Japan’s advanced, efficient manufacturing techniques.

Eventually, the NUMMI plant ran its course for both Toyota and GM, and in 2010, it wound up in the hands of an upstart electric automaker named Tesla.

Tesla’s CEO, Elon Musk, soon demonstrated he thought about auto manufacturing differently than his contemporaries. Like Henry Ford, he insisted Tesla make nearly everything itself, from seats to stamping machines. “Incredibly vertically integrated” is how Harbour describes it.

But the revolution that Tesla sparked with its sensational electric cars forced traditional automakers to go in the other direction.

The extraordinary cost and uncertain payoff of scaling up production of EVs left them with little choice other than wide and deep partnerships with each other.

“They are facing a massive dilemma,” said Dunne. “On one hand, all of their profits” come from internal combustion engines. “But … the future is electric vehicles and autonomous vehicles. Oh, and by the way, there’s no money in EVs right now.”

GM and Ford are party to the biggest alliances that are lighting the auto industry’s way through uncertain times.

In December, Ford said it would invest $1.2 billion at its factory in Cologne, France, to make a mass-market EVs built on an electric skateboard from Volkswagen. GM will build cars for Honda Motor Co. Ltd., including an Acura at a GM plant in Tennessee, using GM’s Ultium batteries.

‘Amazon doesn’t want to build a car’

But these kinds of partnerships — big traditional meets big traditional — are only the most, well, traditional way that EVs are changing the complexion of manufacturing.

An entirely different approach is underway at Arrival, a British startup that is building electric vans and trucks at two “microfactories” in North Carolina and South Carolina.

A typical auto factory is a vast endeavor built for hundreds of millions of dollars, meant to issue vehicles across a continent. Mike Abelson, Arrival’s U.S. CEO, said the company will have many regional factories that each could be completed for $40 million to $50 million. The company will make modest numbers of vehicles, custom-tailored to regional customers.

Other new electric entrants are using contract manufacturing on a scale never imagined by the big automakers.

Fisker Automotive, for example, is an automaker that itself will do little making. The California company has no immediate plans to build a factory. Instead, its first vehicle, an SUV called the Ocean, is being made by Magna, the Austrian contract manufacturer. Its second will be fabricated by iPhone maker Foxconn.

And remember Foxconn? The Fisker partnership is just one way the Taiwanese firm is preparing to become a name in EVs. Recently it struck deals with several big names to produce electric skateboards in China, including Geely, one of the stalwarts of China’s auto industry.

And then there is the unpredictable, formidable arrival of Big Tech.

Most well-known to Americans is Apple. Its auto project, internally called Project Titan, started in 2014. News reports in the last few months suggest the company is on the search for an automaking partner — first Hyundai Motor Co., then Kia Corp., and now, according to The Korea Times, Korean battery maker LG Chem Ltd. and Magna, the Austrian contract manufacturer.

Another contender could be Amazon. In addition to its tie up with Rivian, which is supposed to produce 100,000 electric delivery vans by 2030, the e-commerce company last year bought Zoox, a maker of autonomous vehicles, for $1.2 billion.

And while these wealthy companies might enjoy the cachet of being an automotive brand and the new venue to capture the customer, there’s a giant arena they won’t touch.

“Amazon doesn’t want to build a car,” said Harbour, the auto consultant. “Apple doesn’t want to build a car. But they need a Hyundai or a Kia to productize it.”

Across the Pacific in China, where both the tech and EV industries are developing at a gallop, the two are starting to ride the same horse.

In the last month, Huawei, a telecom giant, declared it will spend $1 billion this year and work with three automakers to make cars carrying a Huawei logo, much in the way Intel Inside appears on laptops. And Xaomi, a leading maker of smartphones, said it would spend $10 billion by 2030 to make cars carrying its name.

Other Chinese tech companies — Alibaba Group Holding Ltd., Baidu and Didi Chuxing Technology Co. — are also pursuing auto ventures.

Does Big Tech have the steel?

This confusing new landscape of concepts, definitions and players carry great opportunity and risk for traditional automakers.

On the upside, they have something no one else has: a track record of mass-producing vehicles that can withstand decades of abuse on the road. Hitching to a leading tech company could prepare them for the next century.

A partnership with Apple would bring an automaker “to a new level,” said Harbour, pointing to what they’d learn about hardware and software. “Any of them would want to work with Apple or Google because of what they’d learn.”

But bringing on a partner with more smarts, resources and brand recognition could also lead to an automaker being eclipsed — or worse, its product being a mere commodity.

“They will be simply relegated to being a low-margin manufacturer,” Dunne said.

Do tech companies, with their shape-shifting software and short-lived phones, have the temperament to handle the grit thrown at them by roads, regulators and customers? The very idea raises the ire of Akio Toyoda, the president of Toyota.

“Anyone can make a car if they have the technical ability,” Toyoda said in recent comments reported by The Wall Street Journal. “But once they make a car, I hope they’ll recognize they have to steel themselves for 40 years of responding to customers and to various changes.”

Toyoda added that the prospect of Apple-as-automaker does not cause him to lose sleep.

But Toyota and other traditionalists face fraught decisions about how much they want to change in response to these new forces. There is no guarantee that the existing model for making cars — or those who make them — will survive. Today’s leading automakers could wind up in a corner, holding nothing but a skateboard.

“It’s a big gamble,” said Dunne of the stony path to electrification, “and the boardrooms of every automaker around the world are having this debate as we speak.”

Honda Motor Co (7267.T) is aiming to increase its ratio of electric vehicles (EVs) and fuel cell vehicles (FCVs) to 100% of all sales by 2040, chief executive Toshihiro Mibe said on Friday.

Speaking at his first news conference since taking the helm of Japan’s second-largest automaker at the beginning of April, Mibe said the company supported the government’s green goals.

“I believe it is the responsibility of an automaker to achieve our carbon-free goal on a ‘tank-to-wheel’ basis,” Mibe said.

The company expects EVs and FCVs to account for 40% of sales by 2030 and 80% by 2035 in all major markets, including North America and China.

Honda’s announcement of its electrification strategy comes after Prime Minister Yoshihide Suga vowed Japan would aim for a 46% cut in emissions by 2030 and look for ways to go even further, nearly doubling from its previous target.

The target set by the government is “feasible”, Mibe said.

“While the government’s target is extremely difficult, I believe it is a feasible target from the viewpoint of Japan becoming carbon neutral in 2050,” he said.

“As for Honda, we are in full support of this target – 46% -and we’d like to put all our efforts towards achieving the goal,” he added.

Mibe began his leadership amid a growing shift in automobile technology to electric vehicles and autonomous driving. Traditionally known for its fuel-efficient internal-combustion engines, Honda launched its first mass-produced all-battery vehicle last August.

Mibe said Honda will invest a total of about 5 trillion yen ($46.3 billion) in research and development initiatives, including electrification, over the next six years, regardless of sales revenue fluctuations.

In North America, Honda and GM will introduce two jointly-developed large-sized EV models using GM’s Ultium batteries in 2024, and will launch a series of new EV models which feature a new EV platform dubbed e:Architecture.

In Japan, Mibe said it was aiming for EVs and FCVs to account for 20% of sales by 2030 and 80% by 2035. Meanwhile, he said Honda will include hybrid vehicles in its 2040 target, citing that changing conventional cars to hybrid is a “realistic solution” for the domestic market.

Mibe said the company also aimed to include advanced driver-assistance systems in all of its models in major markets by 2030.

($1 = 107.9100 yen)

Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.

Climate scientist Daniel Horton says from an environmental perspective, electric vehicles – like he drives, if he’s not biking or walking – are a no-brainer.

“Internal combustion engines that we drive around in are very inefficient, compared to the power generation stations that create the electricity that we use to power the electric vehicles. And so we know that if we adopt electric vehicles, our carbon emissions will go down. They’ll still exist in the form of fossil-fuel based electricity generation, but it will be much lesser than the individual vehicles that people drive today,” he said.

Horton, who leads the Climate Change Research Group at Northwestern University, said he takes a solution-oriented approach to his research, including models that use different energy scenarios. One found that the U.S. could save lives and prevent 250 gigatons of carbon emissions each year if a quarter of the nation’s drivers swapped their regular gas-guzzlers for electric-powered vehicles.

In addition to the carbon dioxide reductions, there’s an air-quality benefit, he said. Internal combustion engine cars also emit particulates that can be harmful to breathing.

“The removal of those pollutants from the tailpipes of your vehicle can have significant health benefits to society,” Horton said.

President Joe Biden’s new climate commitments and proposed massive infrastructure program aim to quickly move the nation on the path to green vehicles.

Chicago and Illinois likewise have goals of going down that road.

Last August, Gov. J.B. Pritzker released an eight-point plan that boldly declared “we will become the best state in the country for electric vehicle producers and consumers,” including by increasing the adoption of electric vehicles in the state to 750,000 by 2030.

Should that happen, EVBox’s Megha Lakhchaura said Illinois would need to have 100,000 charging ports – 98,000 more than the 2,000 there are now. EVBox manufactures “super-fast” chargers from suburban Libertyville. Lakhchaura said the company hopes to help fill that gap.

It’s not just personal cars that could increase the percentage of electric vehicles on the roads and help to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

Pritzker Thursday signed an executive order establishing a working group tasked with ensuring Illinois future vehicle purchases be for low or zero emission vehicles.

The Chicago Transit Authority in early April debuted new electric buses that run back and forth from Navy Pier along Chicago Avenue to the West Side.

Susan Mudd with the Environmental Law and Policy Center said it’s a route that means the cleaner, quieter buses are serving “neighborhoods frankly that have more air pollution and more health problems and more historic impact from air pollution.”

The other advantage, she said, is that Navy Pier tourists can see that electric buses are different – but not too much different.

“People aren’t used to thinking about plugging in their car overnight,” Mudd said. “As more of these are literally seen people will understand it’s not really such a huge, huge change.”

Another potential landmark for the electric vehicle movement, the “Clean Commute for Kids” Act, was introduced in Congress half; the measure aims to electrify half the nation’s fleet of school buses.

Illinois set aside $10 million of its portion of the Volkswagen diesel emission settlement money to spend on helping with the purchase of the more-expensive electric vehicles, though advocates are frustrated that thus far the state has only helped to get a handful on the roads.

Most of the money’s sitting idle.

An Illinois Environmental Protection Agency representative Thursday did not address the reason for the delay.

Follow Amanda Vinicky on Twitter: @AmandaVinicky

---

Harrisburg held a ribbon-cutting ceremony on Thursday for its new electric vehicle charging stations.The eight stations are in the City Island Garage.”I’m giving great thanks to PA DEP’s driving forward program, which was the grant program which has allowed us to put in these new electric vehicle charging stations, right here, in the garage on City Island,” Mayor Eric Papenfuse said.There are more than 20 charging stations in the city.Papenfuse said the city is converting portions of its fleet to electric vehicles.

The city of San Diego is spending $155,000 on a pilot project with a local company that will use an innovative design to charge the city’s growing fleet of electric vehicles with the expectation that the program will put a dent in the city’s $6 million annual fuel bill.

A pair of Electric Vehicle Autonomous Renewable Chargers, or EV ARCs, have been placed in the City Operations Yard near downtown, each with the ability to charge up to five vehicles at a time, day and night.

The $155,000 is “a little bit of an upfront investment but slowly but surely, we’ll be able to pay back the cost of these with fuel savings,” said Colin Santulli, program manager for the city of San Diego’s Department of Sustainability. “Eventually, these will pay for themselves.”

At first glance, the EV ARC looks like any other charging station for an electric or plug-in car.

But each unit is comprised of a dedicated 43-kilowatt solar panel overhead that generates its own electricity, an energy storage unit and a 1-inch ballast pad on the ground that fits into a standard 9-feet-by-8-feet parking space. Five charging ports are found at the top of the pad that can charge any EV model.

Made by Beam Global out of Miramar, the EV ARCs operate independently of the electric grid.

Each EV ARC weighs about 10,000 pounds but the units are transportable. They do not require the expense of digging trenches to run power to the unit so they do not need special permitting.

“From a taxpayer’s point of view, they’re not paying for the disruption of the construction, they’re not paying for the energy costs moving into the future,” said Beam Global CEO Desmond Wheatley. “And in every instance where we’re deployed across the world, it was far less expensive to do this solution.”

The pilot program will run for six months and then city officials will evaluate its effectiveness and determine if it wants to purchase more EV ARCs. Santulli said the expected payback period will be about five to six years.

“To find a project like this where you don’t have to do construction, trenching and all of that, and you can use the sun as a way to produce electricity is a great idea for me,” said San Diego City Councilwoman Marni von Wilpert, who is also chair of the city’s Active Transportation and Infrastructure Committee.

The city’s fleet has 450 low- or zero-emission vehicles, including 20 EVs, with three more coming in the next few weeks, Fleet Operations Director Casey Smith said. The San Diego Police Department has 289 hybrid vehicles, with 100 more on order.

Under the city’s Climate Action Plan, a target has been set to increase zero-emission vehicles in the municipal fleet by 90 percent of gasoline-powered vehicles by 2035. Overall, the city looks to cut greenhouse gas emissions in half by 2035.

“We spend a lot of money on fuel,” Mayor Todd Gloria said. “We need to make this transition. We’ve committed to this transition. Energizing our municipal fleet is one of our strategies in our Climate Action Plan so we must do this.”

Gloria noted the “elegant design” of the EV ARC and said the pilot program “fits well and it’s a happy coincidence that this is a San Diego company.”

Originally called Envision Solar International, Beam Global has been in business for more than a decade and turned in $6.2 million in gross sales last year, Wheatley said. The company employs a staff of about 40 at its headquarters in Miramar, where EV ARCs and other transportation electrification infrastructure are manufactured at a 52,000 square-foot facility.

Wheatley said the units can be found in about 100 municipalities in the U.S., including New York City and Oakland. The solar panel is guaranteed to withstand wind speeds of up to 120 mph. The unit’s energy storage device allows it to deploy charging power when the sun is not shining.

“We bring them in on a special hydraulic transportation unit,” Wheatley said. “A single individual brings it in, uses the hydraulics, lowers it down onto the ground, drives away, it’s ready to operate.”

As electric vehicles (EVs) become more common, so are the opportunities to assess their protective abilities. Two new evaluations have found that overall, vehicles that run exclusively on battery power are at least as safe as conventional ones. 

This “growing evidence” is based on new crash tests of two electric vehicles that recently earned top safety awards from the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety, as well as a new analysis of insurance safety data that indicated that injury claims are substantially less frequent in crashes involving electric vehicles.

The results of the new examinations were released on Thursday by the Insurance Institute, a nonprofit financed by the insurance industry.

“It’s fantastic to see more proof that these vehicles are as safe as or safer than gasoline- and diesel-powered cars,”  David Harkey, president of the insurance institute, said in a statement. “We can now say with confidence that making the U.S. fleet more environmentally friendly doesn’t require any compromises in terms of safety.”

The findings were based on recent crash tests on two new all-electric models – 2021 Ford Mustang Mach-E, a midsize SUV,  and the  2021 Volvo XC40 Recharge, a small SUV,  conducted by the Insurance Institute. Both vehicles also scored good ratings in all six of the institute’s crash worthiness tests and for evaluations of their headlights and vehicle-to-vehicle and vehicle-to-pedestrian front crash prevention systems.

Earlier this year, the Audi e-tron, Audi e-tron Sportback and Tesla Model 3, all-electric vehicles, as well as several plug-in hybrid vehicles also earned safety awards from the institute.

In a separate, updated analysis from the Highway Loss Data Institute, an affiliate of the Insurance Institute, electric vehicles were found to have lower injury claim rates than their conventional counterparts. The study, which examined collision, property damage liability and injury claims, looked at electric and conventional versions of nine models from 2011 to 2019, yielded more than twice as many samples as an earlier study conducted in 2017.

The new analysis of insurance claims, which did not include the data for the two 2021 vehicles recently crash tested —the Ford Mustang Mach-E and the Volvo XC40 Recharge,  highlights loss trends for EVs overall. It indicated that rates of injury claims related to the drivers and passengers of electric vehicles were more than 40% lower than for identical conventional models from 2011 through 2019. 

This result is similar to an earlier study of hybrid vehicles, “and one likely explanation is that the large batteries used in both types of vehicles make them substantially heavier than their conventional counterparts,” the safety group noted, as “occupants of heavier vehicles are exposed to lower forces in multi vehicle crashes.”

To learn more about the analyses, click here.