For most of his 35-year law enforcement career, Tony Abdalla wanted a cruiser that didn’t need emergency lights and sirens to announce itself. “I came on the job in 1989 with the Los Angeles Police Department, and the division I was assigned to—Probation—had a Plymouth Fury in the back parking lot, and I thought that was the greatest car around,” he tells OFFICER Magazine, “It was loud, noisy, all kinds of horsepower. I thought it was great.”
This article appeared in the November/December issue of OFFICER Magazine. Click Here to subscribe to OFFICER Magazine.
When he traveled about 8 miles north on the 110 to join the South Pasadena Police Department, where he currently serves as a sergeant in the detective bureau, Abdalla customized his unit to up the volume on its growl.
“When I came to South Pass, I think we had Crown Vics at the time,” he says. “I used to turn the air cleaner cover over to make the car sound louder. I was not an EV guy.”
Jump to earlier this year: South Pasadena moved its police fleet to electric vehicles. The department rolled out 10 new Tesla Model Ys as patrol cruisers and 10 Tesla Model 3s as detective and administrative vehicles as part of the city’s overall low-emission and sustainability push. The move should’ve rankled such an admirer of gas-powered Detroit steel like Abdalla. Instead, it opened his eyes to new possibilities.
“This was not on my radar screen at all until I started doing my due diligence on this project, and I'm like, ‘Oh, not only does this look like the right solution for our department, I think I need one of these, too,’” he says. “So I ended up buying the same variant that we use as our patrol cars. I bought a Model Y, long range, for myself, and I love it.”
Electric vehicles aren’t new in law enforcement. Departments began exploring them and hybrid vehicles as automotive options as far back as the late 2000s. And while agencies have flirted with electric vehicles for the past decade thanks to pilot programs and test units, a few like South Pasadena are putting a ring on them and switching to all- or mostly electric fleets.
An exciting, frightening decision
South Pasadena’s journey along electric avenue started back in 2005 when the city adopted its first low-emission vehicle policy, says Abdalla. That political will—fueled, in part, by a city council member “who was very sustainability conscious,” adds Abdalla—led to the department kicking the tires on a few low-emission vehicles.
“We had a pretty long history of saying, not necessarily no, but not now,” he says. “We ran through several different pilots. We tested a number of low-emission vehicle platforms, and none really met our needs.”
Until 2019 when Tesla released its Model Y.
“That piqued our curiosity, because we thought that might be the first real … EV that could possibly meet our needs,” says Abdalla. “So we started diving deep into the research and due diligence, and when we completed that process, what we found for our use case, not only was it a viable solution, but it became the best solution, because we had to replace an entire fleet. So we looked at it as an opportunity to really kind of reinvent the way that we did business, evaluate all the solutions that were currently on the market, and pick the best one that was available for us.”
In the three years before the department went in front of the city council in September 2022 to request approval for its EV fleet, Abdalla says wear-and-tear had begun taking its toll on the vehicles. The cost of repairs, along with issues finding parts, had also become an issue. For example, one cruiser had blown an engine, and it took a year to source a new one. This confluence of circumstances—the state of the fleet, Tesla’s new model and the city’s willingness to adopt environmentally responsible practices—provided the impetus for seeing if the department and electric vehicles were a good match.
The department evaluated the Teslas safety, reliability and performance to make sure the vehicles could support a law enforcement deployment. Outside of the vehicles, the agency looked into the area’s charging infrastructure and whether it was big enough to support a police fleet.
Officials also needed to make sure the vehicles could be properly fitted with light bars, radios and other equipment. Upfitters had had decades of practice equipping gas-powered vehicles with after-market upgrades and additions. But that same wealth of experience isn’t there for electric vehicles yet, making finding the right upfitter anything but a slam dunk.
“It was exciting and frightening at the same time, because there wasn't any other template in place to do a complete (fleet) conversion all at once,” says Abdalla. “But again, because of all the research and due diligence that we did … we felt very comfortable moving forward. We knew that there was going to have to be a lot of problem-solving going on, but we assembled what we thought was the best team to deal with that, that had the most experience and proven track record with moving forward with something of this magnitude and really being a project of firsts. So I think it really comes down to the selection of who you will have supporting that transition and making those good choices.”
'It ain’t cop fast'
While Abdalla thinks South Pasadena is on the ground floor of the electric police vehicle revolution, he doesn’t view the agency as an early adopter. Part of South Pasadena’s research involved tracking roughly 36 other agencies that had rolled out one or more Teslas into their fleets, such as its upstate neighbor in Fremont, which began using hybrids in 2009 and now has two Teslas.
“Our agency really stood on their shoulders and benefited from their willingness to share their data and experiences with us that we felt comfortable making it an entire tradition or transition,” he says.
Another department South Pasadena consulted was nearly all the way across the country in a community that seemed to be its mirror opposite: Bargersville, Indiana. Where South Pasadena is in electric vehicle-friendly California, Bargersville is nearly 20 miles south of Indianapolis in an area without widespread charger distribution. Where South Pasadena’s move to electric was sparked by environmental concerns, Bargersville’s switch was prompted by another force of nature: Money.
In 2019, Chief Todd Bertram needed to trim $100,000 from a $1.2 million budget in order to hire two more officers. Backed into a financial corner, Bertram was receptive to anything that could land him his two officers without crippling the department with onerous cuts. His search for solutions led him to investigate replacing gas-powered cruisers with Teslas to save on fuel and maintenance costs.
The math worked when Bertram crunched the numbers, but the chief was skeptical that a Tesla could handle like a traditional cruiser.
“I was watching YouTube at the time, and I'm like, YouTube says this car is fast,” he tells OFFICER. “I'm like, we'll see. It ain't cop fast. It don't handle like a cop car needs to handle.”
The Tesla, however, proved Bertram wrong.
“It performed better than the Dodge Charger that we were driving” he says. “It was faster. It had a shorter braking distance. It was safer. … This is like a win-win all the way around.”
The department purchased two Tesla Model 3s in 2019. Now, Bargersville has just over a dozen Teslas in its fleet, and it recently added a Ford F-150 Lightning electric pickup truck that its SWAT and dive units can use for its bed space.
“Over the last 10 years, eight years at least, we've lowered the maintenance budget, and almost eliminated the fuel budget,” says Bertram. “The fuel budget when we had eight cars was 60 grand, and now the fuel budget, when we have four gas cars now and 13 Teslas is 30 grand.”
Aligning stakeholders
Heading a department that’s the tip of the spear for electric vehicle adoption, Bertram says he’s fielded calls from hundreds of chiefs and officers looking for insight. He thinks, “92% of the agencies across the country could benefit from the savings of an electric car and not lose any performance.”
“But before a department tries to phase in electric vehicles, not only do officials need to thoroughly research and evaluate the automobiles and the supporting infrastructure but also make sure key stakeholders are aligned,” says Abdalla.
“That can be anybody from the police department to the city's decision makers, the community, public works department, mechanics, finance department, anybody that will touch a program like this needs to be aligned,” he adds. “And that's basically done through education. It probably took us a good year's worth of education to get to the point where our city decision makers felt comfortable supporting it.”
A year of informing the public sounds like a long stretch, but a change of the magnitude of moving to an electric fleet, Abdalla says, can be tough for lawmakers and the public to wrap their heads around. It was important for the city to lay out the roadmap for what the department was doing, seeking community input and allaying any concerns at the outset.
“We're confident that if you go out there and do more of that education that the cars and the platform really sell itself because there's something in it for everybody,” says Abdalla. “The police department gets a much better car that performs way better, that costs significantly less to maintain and fuel. There's a tax savings. … There's a cost savings, and also a sustainability benefit to the community and the decision makers as well.”
