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3 services plan to buy electric cars

Aiming to save fuel and advance alternative-energy plans, the Army, Navy and Air Force intend to buy thousands of battery-powered, 35-mile-an-hour electric cars and light trucks to provide on-base transport, senior Army officials said.

The first of the cars, called Neighborhood Electric Vehicles, or NEVs, will be at Fort Belvoir, Va., by mid-December, said Paul Bollinger, deputy assistant Army secretary for energy and partnerships.

The Army plans to order the street-legal NEVs from E-Z-Go, Native American Biofuels International and other electric car makers. E-Z-Go, which is a subsidiary of defense giant Textron, makes golf carts that are listed online at about $1,300 each.

Some 800 cars will be delivered next year and 4,000 over the next three years. Ultimately, “we should be able to go to at least 10,000 vehicles overall,” Bollinger said.

The Army’s plan has persuaded its sister services to jump on board.

“The good news is that the Air Force and Navy have come to us and said that they want to piggyback on the order. Previously, the Air Force was looking at low-speed vehicles, which are actually still gasoline vehicles. We’ve skipped that and we are going straight to electric. We are eliminating the fuel issue, period,” Bollinger said.

The Army is moving quickly; the purchase plans were unveiled in October as part of the service’s ambitious new energy strategy, which also calls for the construction of solar and geothermal facilities.

Bollinger, citing General Services Administration figures, said each electric car would use an average of about $400 in electricity per year, compared with the roughly $2,400 in fuel needed to run a gas-powered car. Moreover, the 4,000 electric cars will save 11.5 million gallons of fuel per year, he said.

The first batch of vehicles likely will be leased from Native American Biofuels International through a small-business set-aside, Bollinger said. The Army expects to continue to lease the electric cars on a yearly basis and possibly buy them down the road. “We will not be paying any more for the NEV than for a standard gasoline-powered vehicle,” Bollinger said.

“We are not going to buy enough to be a market maker, but we can be a market initiator,” Bollinger said. “If we buy 10,000 of these vehicles, piggyback that with perhaps 10,000 by the Air Force and 10,000 for the Navy, that is 30,000 vehicles. Automobile manufacturers can then decide if there is a market for these. We have at least created the market to get something started.”