President Biden has been busy during his first few weeks in office, with the 46th President of the United States significantly pledging to replace every single federally-owned vehicle with an electric or electrified vehicle.
Biden hasn’t clarified whether the plan includes military vehicles, but he has said that all of them will be made in America. If a report from the US Government’s General Services Administration in July 2020, the US federal government administration owns and runs around 382,901 non-military vehicles, with most being used by the US Postal Service.
Clearly it is going to be a massive undertaking, but the US government going all in on EVs or net-zero emissions electrified vehicles can only be a good thing. More plug-in vehicles on US roads will be a lesson for Australia in potentially how to roll our a similar policy if our government ever embraces a similar policy. It will of course mean the need for more charging stations, and even a small percentage of those charging stations being made available to the public would make living with an EV significantly easier in parts of the country where charging stations aren’t necessarily a familiar sight. An embrace of EVs as government vehicles in Australia would have a similar effect here.
Biden’s plan will also no doubt help speed up the development of EV tech for the future, hopefully bringing EVs that have even more range and are even kinder to the environment in terms of what materials are used and how they are sourced. But perhaps most importantly, it will bolster the growth of manufacturing in the United States and push the U.S. economy to a cleaner, more renewable future. It may just be a lesson for our legislators.
