Can an Electric Car Catch a Criminal? The Physics, the Payload and the Pursuit

In September 2019 an officer in Fremont, California, radioed something no pursuit commander had heard before: his patrol car — a Tesla the city had converted as an experiment — was low on charge, and he would “have to find a way to get it to the Supercharger.” The suspect got away, for unrelated reasons, and nobody was hurt. But the call named the question now sitting on every police fleet manager’s desk: when the fleet goes electric, what happens on the day the job does not fit the battery?

This is written for the people who answer that with a signature — the procurement leads and policy makers deciding what the next generation of police cars will be. The useful brief is neither the salesroom’s (it out-accelerates anything a criminal drives) nor the sceptic’s (they run out mid-shift). It is duller, and it holds: match the powertrain to the role, fund the charging before you buy the cars, and never let a manufacturer’s demonstration — or a tabloid anecdote — write fleet policy.

The commitment: 32,000 vehicles, 80% diesel, fewer than 1,000 chargers

UK forces run just under 32,000 vehicles. When the National Police Chiefs’ Council, the Association of Police and Crime Commissioners and BlueLight Commercial launched their joint decarbonisation programme in November 2021, about 80% were diesel, police estates held fewer than 1,000 charge points, and the programme’s own analysis put the number a fully electric fleet would need above 8,000. From 2030 no new petrol or diesel car can be sold in the UK; plug-in hybrids get until 2035. Nothing carves out a police car. The direction is fixed; the argument is the route.

Some forces moved early. Gloucestershire bought 75 Nissan EVs in February 2020 — then the largest electric share of any UK fleet — Police Scotland ordered 180 Hyundai Konas, seven forces trialled a converted Ford Mustang Mach-E, and the Met has run hydrogen Toyota Mirais since 2018. This is a live experiment with years of results in, and they are more interesting than either slogan.

What a police car does all day (and why most of it suits a battery)

The image behind the sceptic’s case is a car at 140 mph. The reality of response work is short hard bursts, a lot of low-speed patrol, and hours parked with the lights on.

The best public numbers come from a trial Tesla ran with UK emergency services in 2021. Read them with the scepticism any manufacturer’s demonstration earns — but read them: a converted Model 3 managed over 200 miles of blue-light driving on a charge, three hours of ANPR cost “less than a few miles”, and — the figure that matters most — the average UK blue-light run lasts 7 to 15 minutes. The shape holds beyond the sales deck: Škoda’s police Enyaq claims over 300 miles, and East Midlands Ambulance Service’s electric cars average about 40 miles a day.

The static half of the shift is where the EV simply wins. A patrol car spends around half its time idling, and an idling diesel burns roughly two litres an hour to run a few hundred watts of lights and radios; an EV holds the same cordon at about 0.2 kWh an hour — a 75 kWh pack could light a scene guard for most of a week. Add the instant torque that wins the 0–30 sprint deciding whether a failed-to-stop even becomes a pursuit, and the verdict on the ordinary day is plain: for beat, neighbourhood, most response and all static work, the electric car is the better tool, not a compromise.

Then there is the other 2% of the job.

The pursuit problem: the cube law does not negotiate

Pin this above the procurement desk: the power to push a car through the air rises with the cube of its speed. Double the speed, eight times the drag power. At 30 mph aerodynamics barely register; at 130 they are the whole bill. That is why lab range collapses at speed. Independent testing of a BMW i4 M50 — the closest thing to an electric traffic car — measured 155 Wh/km at 90 km/h and 217 at 120. Push to real pursuit speed and it stops being subtle: a Porsche Taycan held at a sustained 160 mph emptied its 93 kWh pack in about 80 miles. Winter takes another bite — 78% range retention at freezing, on Recurrent’s 2025 study of 30,000 cars, and up to 41% loss in AAA’s lab.

The defence is that pursuits are short, and it is mostly right. Geoffrey Alpert’s foundational research finds the typical pursuit runs under five minutes; Pennsylvania, one of the few places that publishes, logged 2,958 in 2023, nearly all short and local. England and Wales publish no national pursuit count at all — we know 18 people died in 17 pursuit-related incidents in 2024/25, but not the denominator. So a fleet is specified for a distribution: a five-minute town chase is nothing to a battery; the same car at 40% charge picking up a long motorway pursuit is another matter, and “the car had to pull out” is not a line any commander wants at an inquest.

Run it. The simulator uses the drag model above (it tracks the measured i4 M50 figures closely) and shows the same chase in your chosen EV and the diesel it would replace.

Three things surface. The typical short chase barely dents a decent pack — the sceptics undersell that. A long motorway pursuit on a half-charge ends with the pursuing car as the constraint, and unlike the diesel it cannot splash-and-dash in five minutes — the enthusiasts undersell that. And the single biggest lever is the starting charge, which makes this a management question before an engineering one.

The battery does not fail the pursuit. The half-empty battery fails the pursuit — and half-empty is a management choice.

The armed response problem: Newton gets a vote

Pursuit is about energy; armed response is about mass, and you cannot charge your way out of mass. A UK armed response vehicle — for two decades a diesel BMW X5 — carries three firearms officers, carbines and sidearms, Tasers, enhanced armour, a ballistic shield, method-of-entry kit and the fixed conversion of gun safe, racking, comms and lighting. A 2024 Ergonomics review put specialist officers’ personal kit alone at up to 22 kg each; no force publishes the full fit weight, which is a freedom-of-information request waiting to be filed.

The payload arithmetic is brutal. The X5 offers about 730 kg; its nearest electric sibling, the BMW iX, about 540 kg — because the battery pack weighs roughly 700 kg, and every kilogram of it comes off payload before a door opens. Load both below.

The tell from the 2021 British Mach-E conversion: the builders added a second 12-volt battery just for the police kit, so it would not eat the traction range. Engineers do not add mass to an EV for fun. And in 2026 no manufacturer sells an electric ARV — the NYPD’s 347 Mach-Es are patrol cars, not tactical trucks; the LAPD’s i3s were bought for non-pursuit duties and many sat idle. The biggest forces on earth are still waiting, which tells British buyers where the market actually is.

Diesel is not the safe option either — and charging is a management problem

A brief for the status quo would be wrong, because the diesel pursuit fleet just had its own crisis. In January 2020 PC Nick Dumphreys of Cumbria Police died when the N57 diesel engine of his BMW failed at speed on the M6 — a fault known since 2016, effectively confined to police duty cycles. Forces restricted the cars from pursuit; in January 2023 BMW ended specialist sales to UK police. The standard British traffic car and ARV platform came from a supplier that has walked away. “Proven” carries less than its advocates think.

Nor is the sceptic’s favourite anecdote what it seems. When Gloucestershire’s Police and Crime Commissioner said in 2022 that officers’ EVs “run out of puff” across a rural county, the detail underneath was that officers could not find working chargers mid-shift — infrastructure, not chemistry. That is the whole lesson for a buyer: the failure mode is charging, and charging is a procurement decision, not a property of the car. Depot rapid chargers, bought before the vehicles, sized to the shift pattern and sited behind the wire — because a marked car queuing at motorway services is a security problem as much as a delay. The public network has nearly doubled its rapid count in three years, to about 29,000, but at roughly 94% uptime it is not yet something a response fleet can depend on. A police car is not a taxi; “come back when the charger works” is not in the vocabulary.

Weigh both failure lists and the conclusion is simple: every powertrain is a risk portfolio, and a fleet strategy’s job is to say so out loud.

The options on the procurement desk

The Fremont call is told as a joke at the electric car’s expense. Heard again, it is just pursuit management: a professional reporting a constraint and handing off. Every police car ever built has had constraints — the diesels idling outside the station tonight have a fatal one on the record. The electric fleet’s are at least legible: a cube law, a payload budget, a state of charge. Those you can plan for, buy for and explain. The question on the procurement form is not whether an electric car can catch a criminal. Mostly, it can. It is whether the fleet is specified for the average day or the worst one — and whether someone has funded the chargers and levelled with the public. A police service, of all institutions, does not get to choose the average.

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Sources and further reading

• Tesla UK emergency services trial findings: Electrek’s report of the 2021 Model 3 police pilot (blue-light range, 7–15-minute average runs, ANPR and brake findings); Auto Express on the trial car.
• The Fremont Tesla pursuit: NBC News, September 2019.
• National fleet decarbonisation: BlueLight Commercial’s Sustainability Decarbonisation Programme (November 2021); Police Professional, “Keeping the blue lights on” (fleet size, diesel share, charger estimates); the ZEV mandate and 2030/2035 phase-out.
• Force experience: Nissan’s announcement of Gloucestershire’s 75-EV fleet (February 2020); Fleet News on the PCC’s “run out of puff” remarks and ITV News on rural charging (July 2022); Gloucestershire Constabulary FOI 25/0672 (fleet numbers, 2025); Police Scotland’s 180 Hyundai Konas; the seven-force Mustang Mach-E trial and Ford’s press release on the conversion (second 12V battery); Škoda’s emergency services programme and East Midlands Ambulance Service Enyaqs.
• High-speed consumption: InsideEVs / Bjørn Nyland, BMW i4 M50 range tests, summer and winter (2022); the sustained ~160 mph Porsche Taycan autobahn test; drag physics: x-engineer.org on aerodynamic drag.
• Winter range: Recurrent’s winter analysis of 30,000+ EVs (2025); AAA’s cold-weather testing (2019).
• Charging infrastructure: Zapmap charging statistics (mid-2026 network figures) and Zapmap on charger reliability.
• Pursuit evidence: IOPC deaths during or following police contact, 2024/25; Geoffrey Alpert, Police Pursuit: Policies and Training, NIJ (typical pursuit under five minutes); Pennsylvania State Police annual pursuit report, 2023; College of Policing authorised professional practice on pursuits.
• ARV loadout and payload: manufacturer figures for the BMW X5 xDrive30d and BMW iX xDrive50; 2024 Ergonomics scoping review of police load carriage (3.5–22 kg per officer); Elite UK Forces on ARV crewing and weapons.
• The N57 engine failures: Fleet News on BMW ending specialist police sales (January 2023) and inquest reporting on the death of PC Nick Dumphreys.
• Hydrogen: the Met’s Toyota Mirai fleet (2018 onwards); UK H2Mobility station map.
• Idling: Police1 on patrol idling and fuel (2016); US Department of Energy idle-reduction case study.
• Overseas fleets: NYPD’s Mustang Mach-E purchase; LAPD’s BMW i3 decision and later reporting on their use; German forces’ hybrid approach.

Interactive tools: both were built for this article. The pursuit simulator’s physics model and its assumptions are documented inside the tool itself; the ARV loadout figures are manufacturer payload specifications plus published equipment weights, with estimates flagged. If you have better numbers — particularly a real ARV fit weight — get in touch.