President Biden has announced an ambitious plan to replace the entire federal auto fleet with electric vehicles. The move is part of strategy to embrace clean energy and it comes shortly after Biden rejoined the Paris Climate Agreement. He also stated that the new electric fleet would be built in America, by Americans. Biden often spoke about electric vehicles during his election campaign which made the announcement not entirely surprising.
The scale of the task does look daunting, however, with hundreds of thousands of gas-guzzling vehicles set to be replaced. The latest latest General Services Administration (GSA) Federal Vehicle Report shows that civilian and military agencies together with the Postal Service have 645,000 vehicles in their respective inventories worth more than $4 billion. As of 2019, they had been driven over 4.5 billion miles, consuming 375 million gallons of diesel and gasoline.
Out of the total federal fleet, 336,000 vehicles are gasoline powered, 195,000 run on E-85 and 76,000 are diesel while a mere 3,000 are electric, illustrating the scale of Biden's task. However, the president said it would create one million new autoworker jobs. It would also boost the number of electric vehicles on U.S. streets by 40 percent upon the plan's completion. Thus far, no details have emerged regarding a timeline its implementation.
