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.”
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.