A new initiative by the Dunedin City Council (DCC) is looking to add twenty electric vehicles to the council’s car fleet.
The motion was put forward by Councillor Kate Wilson, and the changes will take place within the next five years.
Staff figures determine that even though Electric vehicles like the Nissan Leaf have a higher initial purchase price, they are much cheaper to run over the course the vehicle’s life than similar sized fossil fuelled vehicles. The cost running the Nissan Leaf is 21c per kilometre in comparison to 22c per kilometre (or more) for the fossil fuel vehicles.
Wilson’s motion looks to put the DCC in a strong position, given that the government is also taking steps to encourage the nation to switch to using the more environmentally vehicles. On May 5th of this year, transport minister Simon Bridges announced a number of measures that would look to increase the uptake of electric vehicles. According to www.driveelectric.org.nz there are currently 1015 electric vehicles registered in New Zealand with 142 public charging locations.
The DCC plans to share information and data collected about the Electric vehicles and their usage with the University of Otago and the Otago Polytechnic. This would look to assist with research on Electric vehicles as well helping others that are looking to convert to electric vehicle fleets.
The purchases will be carried out within current operational budgets. Twenty of the 113 in the DCC’s current vehicle fleet are considered to be suitable to be replaced by the electric vehicles. The council already has two hybrid vehicles and an electric bike
Electric vehicles use no gasoline and so produce no emissions. Thus use of electric vehicles has already saved our country from at least 1138 tonnes of Carbon dioxide emissions this year. This shows the use of the vehicles to have far reaching benefits; with Carbon dioxide emissions being a major factor in global warming. New Zealand generates a lot of its own renewable energy, so the use of Electric Vehicles would mean that money generated and saved from transport energy would stay in the country rather than going to multinational fossil fuel companies.
Electric vehicles are also used widely across the global. In Copenhagen, 80 percent of their municipal vehicles are electric. Global sales of Electric vehicles are also on the rise, increasing tenfold in the last five years.