Council in NSW leads way
A council across the Tasman is pleased with the performance of electric vehicles (EVs) in its fleet. Chris Binns, manager of strategy and assets at the City of Sydney, was one of the keynote speakers at Drive Electric’s plug-in fleet day on April 30. He told Autofile Online the council made a commitment to support EVs at a climate change summit in Copenhagen in 2009. “The summit gave us the political green light to push ahead and that’s when we started lobbying with manufacturers,” he says. “The first challenge was getting the EVs. We had wanted to get them into Australia since about 2007 and 2008. It didn’t happen until 2009 and that was only the i-MiEV. “It was simply the lack of EVs, but we didn’t have a problem with getting the financial benefits to stack up. It was more about a leadership statement for us. Our communities expect us to lead.” The council now has about 20 EVs – probably one the biggest of such fleets in Australia. “I’ve spoken to people at councils in rural and regional areas,” says Binns. “They are covering big distances and carrying bigger loads, so EVs may not be suitable to their markets. We only travel 30-40km in them and they tend to suit our environment in Sydney.” Binns says the council was looking at disposing of its EVs after a couple of years, “but we have still got them five years later and they are still running perfectly, so we’ve kept them. They are cheap to run and our maintenance costs have gone down by about 85 per cent”. The council tested the market in 2012 to ascertain resale values of their EVs and they were “pretty ordinary”. But he adds: “There was still a lot of anxiety about battery life back then, so we decided to keep them. “We are probably ready to test the market now, but there’s no reason to sell them because they are still performing perfectly – even for five-year-old cars. I don’t mind keeping onto them for about eight years.”