| Fire trucks would be terrible EVs: - Fire departments cannot afford to have their apparatus out-of-service for hours while they recharge. - The truck alone weighs around 10,000-15,000 lbs, without water, and they carry anywhere from ~500 gallons of water (attack engines) to upwards of ~2600 gallons (tenders). That’s 14,175lbs to 36,710lbs of truck. - The engine powers the apparatus itself, its pumps, and often, a huge alternator for its electrical systems, and an inverter supplying 110V for use with fans, portable lighting, etc. It has to do this for hours. > Generators are a thing that pretty much every one of these services will have. Because you can't have a fire station, EMT dispatch, etc go dark because of a grid down situation. There is a several order-of-magnitude difference between the power required to service the station, dispatch, etc, as opposed to what’s required to rapidly recharge the kind of massive batteries an EV fire apparatus would require. > And, consider this when thinking of a "grid down" situation. How do you pump fuel if the grid is down? Local government maintains diesel generators and a fuel supply to handle this kind of extreme infrastructure failure. > For everything semi-truck and smaller, batteries have a high enough capacity to service today. Fire trucks aren’t semis. They have very different energy demands, usage patterns, risk profiles, and failure modes. |