If you had thought electric vehicles were not as fast or as safe as their fossil-fuelled counterparts, the West Australian police will set you straight. Since July 2022, their operational fleet has included a Hyundai Ioniq 5 EV.
Friday, 9 September, three officers are on hand at Forrest Place, at the heart of Perth city. They are attending the Perth World EV Day display, and testifying to the benefits of the first electric cop car in Australia.
Quite the centre of attention, the uniformed officers are peppered with questions, from the curious and the dubious:
‘Does it go as fast?’ Yes, and perhaps takes off a fraction faster than their other current operational vehicles.
‘Is it as safe?’ Yes, it has passed the very stringent safety tests required for police pursuit vehicles.
‘Wow! Has it been in a chase?’ (This is from yours truly) Not yet. But the smiling policeman (who had probably never been such a star attraction) seems entirely confident that no baddy in a petrol-guzzler is likely to outrun this clean green speed-machine! (Ok, so he didn’t exactly say those words, but you get the drift…)
For World EV Day, Forrest Place became a free EV ‘show and tell’ for the thousands of commuters, who walk from the city’s central railway station to their various destinations.
Some 40-plus electric cars filled most of the 150 metre length of pedestrian mall, the car-owners eager to inform passer-by, to convince the undecided and to persuade the agnostics of the benefits of making the change to an EV.
If none of the dozen or so brands and 25 or more models on display took your fancy, there were those who could fit your beloved old VW Beetle or mini-moke with a battery and turn it into something clean, green and quite unique.
The early adopters of electric cars have had several years now to discover all the ways in which an EV makes your life easier. The owner of a BYD T Van (there are just of these three in WA he told me), was sipping a cup of tea he had made on a small electric stove, drawing power from his car battery.
A Kona-owner, who had driven over 100,000kms including several thousand on gravel roads, displayed charts showing savings of $ 30,000 across that distance.
As far as its’ London organisers, Green TV know, Perth was the only Australian capital city to take part in this global celebration of ‘electro-mobility’ (e-mobility). That term might still sound like a bit of jargon, but batteries are clearly driving change (ok, silly pun, moving right on…). On a bicycle, a rechargeable battery will make every up-hill push easier.
Some would-be pilots are already training in an electric powered small aeroplane. If you live in a small town (in Esperance, WA for instance) you probably drop your child off at school and head for the supermarket standing up on an e-scooter. All this and more was on display.
An event such as the Perth World EV Day is simultaneously global and local, led by ordinary people who can share their everyday experience of driving their cars on real roads. It is a potent platform for persuasion through community-based conversations outside of the manufacturer’s hype, or nerdy scientific texts, or the necessarily politicised language of government policy.
World EV Day: an idea worth spreading.
Hurry Krishna is Indian by birth, Australian by accident and a slow traveller by choice. She is an occasional travel blogger and has recently joined The Driven’s team of writers. She speaks a number of Asian languages, including English, and hopes to walk, cycle or drive her trusty Kona EV far and wide around the world. Under a different name she is a professor and has written many academic books and papers in her areas of specialist research in Media and Cultural Studies.