Electric police cars, fire engines and ambulances are all being tried by various authorities in the UK, anxious to move closer to decarbonisation targets.
No organisation is keener on this than the seemingly perpetually ‘cash-strapped‘ National Health Service (NHS) which has established a Green NHS Team, employing 48 people who between them command an annual payroll bill of £3m.
They have drawn up a 135-question process to assess the environmental impact of every NHS procurement decision. These environmental pressures have led some NHS Trusts to reduce or suspend the use of nitrous oxide (N²0, or ‘gas and air’) for general anaesthesia and even as pain relief for mothers in labour.
In the words of Dr Kate Gardner, a consultant anaesthetist at Colchester Hospital: “Nitrous oxide is incredibly damaging and has 300 times the global warming potential of carbon dioxide. It remains in the atmosphere for 114 years.”
N²O is also one of the two gases which are recorded as NOx when vehicle exhaust emissions are measured. It is generally thought to be less harmful than the ‘other’ NOx gas, nitrogen dioxide (NO²), but together their presence in vehicle exhausts has been said to contribute to the causes of up to 23,500 premature deaths in the UK each year.
ELECTRIC MOVE
Unsurprising, then, that parts of the NHS are taking a hard look at their use of diesel vehicles. The London Ambulance Service (LAS) saw in 2024 with its first all-electric emergency ambulance on the road on New Years Eve 2023.
Based on a Ford eTransit, and with a body built in Britain by German specialist WAS, the vehicle is claimed to have sufficient battery capacity to power it for a 12-hour shift, including all the HVAC and other equipment that is a requirement for a front-line ambulance.
Time to recharge on DC from 10% to 80% is said by Ford to be 28 minutes, and a range of 211 miles is claimed. Three more have since joined it in service.
These vehicles are the first of 12 fully electric ambulances that will be piloted by NHS England’s Net Zero Travel and Transport team in partnership with LAS and four other ambulance trusts, and will enable the collection of ’real-life’ data. This will be used to inform the wider rollout of zero-emission emergency ambulances in the future.
Unlike some other emergency ambulances, the eTransit-based vehicle can be driven on a car licence. LAS has also invested in electric cars with some enthusiasm: the highest profile vehicles in its BEV fleet are 42 Ford Mustang Mach-E sportscars, which are used as rapid response vehicles alongside many, humbler BEVs in less glamourous roles. The Mustang’s claimed range is some 300 miles (said to be 10 times that of the average milage travelled in a single shift), and charge time to 80% is 40 minutes.
Supporting a BEV fleet of this size is not a cheap exercise: LAS is also investing £31m in charging infrastructure and the recruitment and training of technical staff.
It has been estimated that providing sufficient charging infrastructure at hospitals and ambulance stations to support a 100% electric fleet would cost £100m, and with electric ambulances costing around £150,000 each it might take up to 15 years in service for an electric ambulance to recoup the price premium over a diesel equivalent through fuel saving. Normally, the NHS replaces ambulances on a cycle of around five years.
The total cost of electrifying the NHS ambulance fleet has been reported by the Daily Telegraph as half a billion pounds. To put this in context, the organisation’s total annual budget is a staggering £192bn, so an electric ambulance fleet may not be as proportionately expensive as it seems.
Over in Gloucestershire, the local police force was less than enamoured with its initial intake of BEVs, undertaken as part of a pledge to be net zero by 2035.
In 2022 Police and Crime Commissioner for Gloucestershire, Chris Nelson complained that while the county had the highest proportion of BEVs on its fleet of any British police force, the cars were hindering operational efficiency.
He told the county’s Police and Crime Panel that: “I have heard lots of problems with officers driving around in electric vehicles having problems trying to find recharging facilities. Running out of puff and then having to get another vehicle.”
However, such concerns may have been overstated. The Local Democracy Reporting Service subsequently submitted an FOI request on the matter to the force and it emerged that there had been only two instances of its BEVs running out of power: one in 2019 and another in 2021.
The force added that its electric vehicles were not authorised to respond to emergency incidents and were only used to move officers, staff and volunteers to complete enquiries or travel to other locations.
FIRING UP
One vehicle type that is required to respond to emergency incidents is the fire appliance. The excellent low-speed acceleration from a cold standing-start of a powerful electric truck would certainly prove advantageous in this application.
Payload might be a concern on specialist fire service water-carriers which have a capacity of around 1000 litres: every kilo of unladen weight costs a litre of water which is vital when attending fires in rural areas where there may not be a convenient hydrant, or indeed in urban areas where the requirement to deal with a major conflagration can outstrip local mains supply.
But it is of far less concern on most multi-purpose fire tenders. The two-axle Volvo chassis-cabs popular with fire appliance builders are around 2.2 tonnes heavier in electric form than their diesel counterparts.
Although a two-tonne ZEV allowance permits them to operate at 20 rather than 18 tonnes gross weight, this is largely irrelevant as most fire appliances operate at gross weights of around 13 tonnes, including 1800 litres of water.
More important than payload is endurance. Fire appliances may be on-scene for many hours with their engine-driven water pumps running off the vehicle’s PTO and their water supply being replenished either from the mains or by the specialist carriers mentioned above.
Additional electrical systems, most notably lighting, will also serve to drain the batteries on an electric fire appliance. The difficulty in recharging an electric fire appliance in anything like the time required to refuel a diesel one is self-evident.
But this is not the biggest issue. Anxious to reduce its annual fuel bill of £2.6m, local councillors asked Dorset and Wiltshire Fire Brigade if it had considered switching to electric fire engines. The answer was no because the quoted cost had been some £1m per unit.
British manufacturer Emergency One can claim to have built the first electric fire-pump to EN1846. It was ordered by the Scottish Fire and Rescue Service in 2022, with partial funding of £500,000 from Transport Scotland and has a claimed range of 220 miles on an 80% charge.
Built on an MAN TGM chassis-cab, it is propelled by an Allison eGen Power 100D electric drive axle: a drop-in component designed for easy installation into production vehicle frames. This integrates two high-speed electric motors and a multi-speed transmission within the axle structure, eliminating the need for an external prop-shaft.
One of the most powerful electric axles on the market, the eGen Power has a continuous output of 454kW and peak power of 652kW, way over the maximum of 235kW from the most powerful diesel offered for the standard TGM.
