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The $2.1 Billion Case for Building a Federal EV Fleet

The U.S. government’s garage is full of tired, old gas guzzlers costing $1 per mile, mostly in fuel and maintenance.

U.S. Postal Service delivery vehicles outside a post office in Torrance, California.
Photographer: Patrick T. Fallon/Bloomberg
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If President Joe Biden’s administration is going to replace the entire federal vehicle fleet with fully electric vehicles, as promised, it will need trucks and vans — lots of them. 

An analysis of Uncle Sam’s garage found an aging, expensive crush of big rigs — some 645,000 vehicles in all,  almost two-thirds of which are trucks. Another 9% of the fleet is vans and buses. If U.S. automakers want to cash in on a federal fleet overhaul, they would be wise to accelerate efforts to electrify their largest models; none of these large models has been electrified — at least not at scale.