California police aren't loving their Tesla cop cars | Hacker News Reader

California police aren't loving their Tesla cop cars

techcrunch.com

36 pointsdoener53 comments

> say a reliance on unsecured charging stations makes officers vulnerable when it comes to transporting suspects long distances; and note that in a firefight, police are taught to hide behind a car’s engine block

I am a diehard EV proponent, but it's important to admit that there are places where EVs are not the right solution. Especially in vehicles which take part in emergency response, the high energy density of fossil fuels is absolutely a benefit.

It doesn't really look like it? It looks like there was only one case in however many years this officer has worked that they've needed the extra range. If nothing else, they can have one IC car for when long-term trips need to happen.

The rest of the issues sound like Tesla issues, rather than EV issues.

Not being able to hide behind the engine block is a cop specific issue. One that could be fixed by adding armor to some part of the vehicle but still an issue.

They're permitted exactly one combustible engine for purpose? What? The job demands the tool, not you.

>"... in a firefight, police are taught to hide behind a car’s engine block"<

So the cop should possibly orient himself so that his/her head, heart and lungs [and maybe even his/her nuts, if (s)he has 'em] are protected by the engine block ? Good luck with that!

Most cops are larger than most engine blocks. Hiding behind an auto engine block is almost certainly a "Hail Mary" move in a firefight. If you do the math (and compute protection vs officer orientation relative to the shooter(s) and to the engine block) better strategies are to:

- hide - seek concealment, leave if possible,

- run - move away from shooter(s),

- if you are legally required to stay and have a weapon and if you can shoot it well, provide covering fire (to keep the shooter down).

Whilst moving away won't provide protection from a stray bullet, our 3-d world's geometry reduces very rapidly the odds of being hit as you move away from a shooter. The instinctual urges to flee and/or "hit the deck" (lie flat, play dead, etc. until you can see where to flee) are useful.

This is boosted by the fact that most people, cops and otherwise, cannot shoot a firearm (esp. a handgun) accurately. If you have the bad luck to be in a shootout with a marksman who can keep his cool under fire, then you're likely SOL. But the above advice (hide and run) remains valid.

Summary: the presence of an engine block for protection is not a convincing argument against the use of EVs for law enforcement.

I like this:

https://www.wikihow.com/Avoid-Being-Shot

and this:

https://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/hu4srd/whats_the...

These are police officers. They aren't supposed to run away from gun fights as a first option. They need to at least try to engage and shut down the threat.

>hide - seek concealment, leave if possible

That is exactly what the engine block thing is for. It is a last resort but the alternative is to likely get shot through the vehicle or get shot in the back running away from your actual job.

Not to mention, an EV can get shot in the battery leading to a huge fire, possibly incinerating anyone locked in the back seat of the car. EV fires are often sudden and often accompanied by explosions, whereas petrol-fueled cars are very difficult to ignite in a gunfight (contrary to the ridiculous explosions that Hollywood shows).

Summary: You don't have a clue what you are talking about. The cops, many of whom are combat veterans on top of their police training, DO understand the threats.

[I'd pointed out that hiding behind a car's engine block is not optimal and likely a waste of cognitive and physical energy but the "you don't have a clue" statement by wakawaka28 rileD me...]

wakawaka28 says >"...the alternative is to likely get shot through the vehicle or get shot in the back running away..."<

I beg to differ: odds are very much against getting hit at all while fleeing, hiding, or even while staying and doing nothing!. Why?

1. The world is BIG, bullets are small and- there's lots of room to run and/or hide. Furthermore:

2. Few can shoot a firearm,

- fewer can shoot accurately,

- fewer still can shoot moving objects,

- fewer still can shoot a fleeing person and

- next to none can kill/disable a fleeing person.

Sorry to burst your bubble, Deadeye. Do the math!8-))

wakawaka28 says >"...Summary: You don't have a clue what you are talking about. The cops, many of whom are combat veterans on top of their police training, DO understand the threats."<

The average police officer can expect to serve out his entire career w/o having to draw his service revolver in self defense. I am fairly certain that few police officers/veterans understand probability in the real world. But they are good men (mostly) and women and a (somewhat selected) cross-section of society. They, for the most part, pay attention to where they are directed.

>The world is BIG, bullets are small and- there's lots of room to run and/or hide.

You're talking about an object moving at least 1000 feet per second, one with many friends, in most cases, and aimed by someone who probably has a basic understanding of how to hit a human-sized target.

>Few can shoot a firearm, >- fewer can shoot accurately, >- fewer still can shoot moving objects, >- fewer still can shoot a fleeing person and >- next to none can kill/disable a fleeing person.

You truly don't know what you're talking about. Handguns are not the only threat, and they are not so hard to use. Rifles and shotguns are far easier to aim.

>The average police officer can expect to serve out his entire career w/o having to draw his service revolver in self defense.

Again you prove your ignorance. Almost no police carry revolvers due to the fact that technology has improved. A revolver typically holds 5 or 6 rounds and is difficult to reload. There are many inexpensive handguns that can fire 3x as many rounds minimum.

>I am fairly certain that few police officers/veterans understand probability in the real world. But they are good men (mostly) and women and a (somewhat selected) cross-section of society. They, for the most part, pay attention to where they are directed.

Yeah you're gonna go lecture combat veterans to tell them how their lame af EV is good, and they don't have to worry about getting hit by one of 10 to 50 bullets fired at them because probability is on their side. Get your head out of your backside man.

wakawaka28's post (above) is sadly uninformed with a number of errors, and was likely made in anger. So I apologize to everyone: I sometimes bring out the worst in some people. Some notes:

- Yes, I did date myself by my use of the term "service revolver" instead of the better "sidearm", etc.

- My original post was not limited to handguns. I used the term "firearm", which includes all modern guns (rifles, shotguns, pistols, etc.). [Perhaps English is not your native language?]

- I do prefer ICE to EV. Not for any additional protection from the roving bands of 50-(or 500)-round-carrying Deadeye Dick hombres that wakawaka28 ndoubtedly encounters in his paranoid patrols but b/c I'm more familiar with ICEs.

wakawaka28 says >"getting hit by one of 10 to 50 bullets fired at them because probability is on their side"<

Yeah, this happens all the time! Why, just the other day I was walking my dog past wakawaka28's house and, before I could scoop the poop, wakawaka28 jumped out with an AR-15 and (accidentally I'm sure) emptied a magazine into his front lawn and neighborhood. Luckily it was wakawaka28 (who, like most shooters, can't shoot worth a doggy bag full) and his firearm jammed twice, so nothing of value was hit (at least, AFAIK). After I lit my second cigarette, I loaned wakawaka28 my walking stick extension so he could ram it down the barrel and clear the jam. [I wanted to suggest that he ram it somewhere else but I was standing too close and knew that, for once, probability was not in my favor.]

Firearms are better than ever these days but

- probability still holds and

- statistics still prove that

Firearms can be deadly, but firearms encounters aren't nearly as deadly as many, if not most people imagine.

Takeaway: don't be scared by fearmongers!8-))

First off, here's some probability for you. I am likely the only one reading your nonsense at this point. There are often hundreds of comments on posts and people rarely read far into the comments after a post is more than a day old. So, from the jump, you've been talking to a crowd that simply doesn't exist.

Secondly I am not promoting fear of guns. You should get as many guns as your heart desires. You in particular need to go out and see the cool stuff that's on the market. I'm guessing you read a blog post about why a cop can't reliably "just shoot for a leg" or something. That is valid in a particular way, but does not in any way prove that guns are super hard to use. If they were, cops might actually just run away and they'd be issued something else besides a gun to defend themselves.

I never said that firearm encounters are overwhelmingly fatal. However, you continue to lecture people who know more than you in condescending tone, even to the point of presuming you know better than people who are literally trained to be in gunfights. It does make me angry to be talked down to by someone with such an ignorant mentality. Your attitude is not at all rare. There are tons of people out there who think that their idle ruminations and irrelevant credentials cancel out actual experience, and these people are a menace to society.

Have you seen a cop lately? They routinely wear body armor these days. Presumably because they are afraid of stray bullets. After all, they are more likely to get hit by lightning or a galloping horse than a criminal with a $300 handgun that can fire ~18 bullets. Why worry?

You are kinda funny in this reply, if insulting, but truly you suffer from delusions of competence and have added nothing of value to this conversation.

Takeaway: I suggest you reflect on the fact that people with direct experience might actually know better than you.

Article is pretty light on content, and links to something quite more substantial:

https://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/california-switch-ele...

that's a much better link.

the F150 Lightning has much more going for it as a police EV.

I don’t really want cops to have massive trucks.

They, uh, get surplus military equipment. Don't worry though, comms are removed. Eyeroll.jpg

I don't really want them to have that either.

I figured, just having 'fun'. Sharing is caring

Why? I'm very ignorant of the market. Can these vehicles run for 8 - 12 hours consecutively? The maintenance costs must be absurd. I wonder how often the tires must be swapped with this amount of constant wear and tear?

The answer is no, there isn't an EV on the market suitable to be a police vehicle, much less competitive with petrol vehicles. It barely makes sense for even 25% of the population to use EVs, even in ideal conditions with home charging and subsidies, and not accounting for potential extreme weather and evacuations.

In Copenhagen, taxis have taxi-only EV chargers provided by the taxi companies.

The police have not yet ventured towards EVs, but as part of doing that, they must build the charger infrastructure to guarantee reliable charging of their fleet.

Allocating grid for fast charging in a densely populated area isn’t easy. Battery-powered chargers aren’t that common, and building noiseless ones is difficult.

The commercial infrastructure for fast charging is just not good enough yet. Emergency fast chargers need better geographical distribution.

>Battery-powered chargers aren’t that common, and building noiseless ones is difficult.

Noiseless ones means ones that don't use huge diesel generators to meet demand, I assume. You may as well put that fuel into a conventional vehicle if you have to do all that. It's surely more efficient than building like 3x as much stuff just to ultimately burn the same energy.

>The commercial infrastructure for fast charging is just not good enough yet. Emergency fast chargers need better geographical distribution.

I think it will never make sense. If fast service is required it will have to come down to battery exchanges, or else exchanging whole cars.

> Noiseless ones means ones that don't use huge diesel generators to meet demand, I assume.

No, the noisy part is actively cooling a ton of batteries confined to a crammed metal box without disturbing neighbors and keeping within the legal noise limits, which is often a very low boundary in highly populated areas for obvious but inconvenient reasons.

Rapidly discharging a ton of batteries produces a lot of heat.

Frequently overheating batteries will make them degrade more quickly.

This quickly ruins the value proposition when TCO depends on so many things (physical design of EV charger and its ventilation, algorithmic design of battery management system, and electrochemical design of cells).

> If fast service is required it will have to come down to battery exchanges, or else exchanging whole cars

Have you looked outside?

That's not how the world currently works.

All companies that try to hotswap batteries inside cars are miserable.

Real fast-chargers and very fast-charging (800V) cars actually exist.

But yeah, besides a lacking charger infrastructure, adding range anxiety to patrolling officers must be the major dealbreaker.

>All companies that try to hotswap batteries inside cars are miserable.

You misunderstood. The cars must be designed for this, which they are not. Battery swapping was very effective for early EVs over a hundred years ago.

>Real fast-chargers and very fast-charging (800V) cars actually exist.

Nothing can be faster than swapping a battery. It should be possible to swap one in 2 minutes tops, if cars were designed for that. Of course, you'd also need a reliable consumer protection scheme, unless nobody ever owns a battery. You'd need insurance for the battery in any case due to how expensive they are and how easy they are to destroy.

Wouldn't they have known the dimensions of the Teslas before they considered using them? I mean, it's not like they have had zero prior experience on what makes good police cars?!

I think there is a disconnect here between the decision makers and the experts in the Police Garage.

Classic gov’t/big Corp purchasing.

And extra in CA where lip service far outweighs thoughtful policy.

At multiple levels too. Push to switch to EV's regardless of whether suitable vehicles were available, then an extremely bad choice of actual vehicles to buy

this seems like they haven't done their research at all - i find it surprising that they even thought a Model 3 would be a good police vehicle considering its dimensions.

perhaps a better alternative is picking one of the many other EVs that are based on a ICE framework, which i presume would be much easier to modify as required?

The article says they are using Model Ys

oops, could have sworn it said Model 3s - might have been the other article linked

I saw a video, that discussed Ford Fusions, as cop cars.

It made a lot of sense.

Not 100% electric, but they get serious mileage. I used to drive one, and it got about 45 MPG, with pretty good performance.

Totally agree - this story is only really interesting because it is Tesla, and it seems like they could have worked out that they wouldn't be suitable ahead of time. But equally this looks like a trial and maybe they just had to do the trial to dismiss it as a silly option.

It would be the same if some police force decided to purchase BMW Mini's, spent $100k retrofitting each for police work, and then complained that they were too small after the fact.

Total own goal!

All of the complaints were applicable to other EVs, or else a problem of poor planning rather than a problem of Teslas specifically. For example, choosing the small model then complaining that it’s small, or failing to install chargers in their lot then complaining they don’t have chargers in their lot.

They mentioned that other brands weren’t even an option to due to various reasons, so it’s weird that they framed it as a hit piece on Tesla rather than a failure of the EV market.

The piece ends with the F-150 Lightning portrayed as the savior (in a department that had the foresight to install chargers in their lot), but they don’t draw attention to the fact it has most of the same issues cited as complaints in the Tesla section (need to use chargers on long-distance road trips, can’t hide behind an engine block).

The linked article also doesn’t mention any of the positives cited in the article that it’s referencing.

But, you know, any opportunity to shit on something related to Elon Musk…

> All of the complaints were applicable to other EVs

Out of the ten or so complaints I read, only two were applicable to other EVs (can't do long range, which it sounds like they only needed once), and no engine block to hide behind (surely they can just install additional armor on that part of the car).

The rest is Tesla being unfit for being a police car, which, yes, it is, why are you buying something you know doesn't fit your use case?

All of these are true of other brands—most so much so that, as the article points out, they weren’t even on the table as options.

1. Limited space: - Back seats only have room for one prisoner - Officers can't comfortably get in and out with duty belts on - Cramped cabin causes duty belts and vests to jut into passenger seat

2. Modification issues: - Few shops can modify Teslas for police use - Long wait times for modifications (months) - Modifications exacerbate space constraints

3. Charging infrastructure concerns: - Unclear how/where officers would charge vehicles - Potential security issues with charging suspects' transport vehicles at public stations

4. Safety concerns: - No engine block to use as cover in firefights - Low profile limits off-road use and maneuverability

5. "Smart" features interfering with police work: - Autopilot causing delays when shifting into drive - Automatic stopping when pulling over - Complicated process to dim lights at night - Issues with proximity locking, sleep mode, and self-closing doors

6. Maintenance challenges: - Require Tesla technicians for many repairs - Long out-of-service times for repairs

7. Cost issues: - Expensive to transport for modifications - Limited vendor options for outfitting increases costs

8. Not designed for police utility needs: - Lack of storage space for equipment - No easy way to transport items like bicycles and shopping carts

One wonders what the point of this article is besides “we fucked up by choosing something that we should have known did not fit the constraints we had”.

EV is an election issue right now for swing states. So might be a hot topic.

"Now we have dismissed Tesla, we have now decided to purchase tiny clown cars, as we could squeeze many police and suspects in each car"

2 months later

"We have now found that clown cars actually don't go fast enough, as they are only designed to travel at 2-3 miles per hour in a circus ring. Also they are not as big internally as you might think. We are now investing in a drag racing car that will be retro-fit for police work."

"EV bad" propaganda. It's easy to frame it as "we bought some cars that didn't fit our use case, therefore the cars are bad".

> and note that in a firefight, police are taught to hide behind a car’s engine block. With EVs, that’s not an option.

Definitely not an issue I'd ever considered with EVs.

It's not that it's not even an option. Puncture that battery and the raging inferno makes the situation 1000x worse.

Reminder: there are several different EV battery chemistries that would all react differently under this scenario.

Here is an example of someone drilling into a solar LFP battery: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=D8xNjz73p80

It's not really an issue with EV's - if this was a requirement I'm sure they could have modified parts of the car to provide protection.

The issue seems to be that the purchase was poorly thought out and didn't think about all the requirements of a police car.

Yeah, that's the point of me pulling it out: especially relevant to software folks when thinking about product requirements. "It's a car! I know what they need."

Makes me think about new towing trucks our cities have been getting up here in canada - they are all proud of buying electric models... Let me tell you : when it's -20 degrees in winter - the last thing you want having troubles are towing trucks. I get the strategy - but as always what about the operational challenges?

EVs are still on the early adopter phase. Things will get better, but I won't be buying one for the foreseeable.

> EVs are still on the early adopter phase.

Not in California---the subject of the article---it ain't.

I think they meant tech is in the early stages where it's too unstable or undeveloped to be good value.

The objections are about Teslas, not EVs in general.

[dupe] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41810627

This stinks of regulatory capture. If dark maga Elon and his goons pull off this election, they're really gonna take this sucker for everything, aren't they?

Wow, this is a shallow article. The timing of it feels like attempting to offset yesterday's event.

None of the reasons they list are applicable to real world users.

How far are they transporting suspects for range to be a problem? Sounds like a use-case mismatch to me.

I don't think I'm a Tesla fanboy / apologist. Elon is a nut job for supporting Trump and various other conspiracy-theory level outbursts.

US election bullshit article

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