President Joe Biden begins phasing out the federal government’s use of gas-powered vehicles and replacing them with vehicles that run on electricity. The announcement is the fulfillment of a promise Biden made on the campaign to swap government vehicles with U.S. manufacturers.
“The federal government also owns a huge fleet of vehicles that we are going to replace with clean electric vehicles manufactured here in America by American workers,” Biden said during an information session on Monday in which he announced his ‘Buy American’ executive order .
This is good news for American manufacturers of vehicles such as Tesla, Rivian and Lordstown, as well as outdated car manufacturers such as Ford and General Motors who are amidst billions of dollars in investments in the production of electric vehicles.
According to the General Services Administration, as of 2019, there were nearly 650,000 vehicles in the federal government fleet. It includes 245,000 civilian vehicles, 173,000 military vehicles and 225,000 post office vehicles. These vehicles covered 4.5 billion kilometers in 2019.
Biden has also promised to create a system that offers discounts or incentives for consumers to replace gas engines with electric vehicles, although there are currently no further details on the plan.
The details of both plans are still being worked out, but together they represent a major victory for the EV investments made by car manufacturers over the past few years. Ford has said it will spend $ 11 billion on the launch of a range of new cars, including the Mustang Mach-E and an electric version of its top-selling F-150 pickup. GM is committed to spending $ 27 billion on electric and autonomous vehicles by 2025.
Meanwhile, Tesla’s remarkable stock market march through 2020 made it the most valuable automaker in the world, and its CEO, Elon Musk, the richest man on the planet.
Biden’s order may not be a direct win for Tesla, which has mostly focused on luxury and performance vehicles. Car manufacturers that could benefit from this include Ford, which recently launched an electric version of its Transit vans, and GM, which has just spun off a new company called BrightDrop, which focuses on electric delivery vehicles.
One federal agency that can desperately use a new fleet of vehicles with no emissions is the U.S. Postal Service. Hundreds of the agency’s mail trucks, manufactured by Northrop Grumman, have caught fire over the past few years. Under recently reported. And the USPS’s deadline for official offers to make the next-generation mail truck was delayed last year due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
The program to replace the current USPS trucks was launched in 2015, but it led and forced the postal service to keep its current trucks in service for their life expectancy – despite the fact that in the late eighties and early introduction ’90s and lack of features such as air conditioning. Two of the original six companies were withdrawn.
One of Biden’s goals is to create 1 million new jobs in the automotive sector and ‘position America as the world leader in the manufacture of electric vehicles and their feedstocks and spare parts.’ The president said he would achieve the goal by swapping the government fleet for electric vehicles and through a “cash-for-sound” plan to ensure that every vehicle on the road is released by 2040 . And he promised to spend billions of dollars to add 550,000 EV charging stations in the US.
Biden also said he supports the $ 7,500 federal tax credit for electric vehicles and that he will be open to considering new incentives to encourage car buyers to switch to it. Former President Donald Trump tried to end the federal EV tax credit in his 2020 budget proposal, but was unsuccessful. Also under Trump, the Environmental Protection Agency reversed the Obama-era emission rules aimed at forcing the automotive industry to manufacture vehicles that polluted less.
Biden has already taken steps to reverse Trump’s rollback (rollback?) Of the Obama-era emission rules. On the day of its inauguration, Biden ordered federal agencies to review fuel efficiency standards as well as aircraft and appliance emissions rules and to build energy efficiency standards.