The average car spends about 95 percent of a 24-hour day parked.
For the 5 percent that they’re driven, they actually spend one-third of the time idling–at red lights, stuck behind leisurely left-turners, or even while the driver waits for the vehicle to warm up (or cool down) before getting in.
In other words, private automobiles spend only 3 percent of their time actually mobile.
But in the longer run–starting, oh, today–a new study concludes that volume battery-electric vehicles at the low end of today’s price range would save fleet operators an average of $16,000 apiece, compared to the vehicles they’d be replacing, over a service life of seven years.
That projection comes from a British Columbia, Canada, study of fleet vehicles, which suggests that pure battery-electric vehicles–at least, the ones not named Tesla–had enough range today to handle 94 percent of the fleet routes evaluated in the study.