Electric council fleet on the road after being ‘left to gather dust’
AFLEET of electric vehicles that were left to gather dust in Glasgow car parks is now in use by council employees across the city. Last year, the Glasgow Times exclusively revealed that taxpayers forked out almost £2m for 181 electric cars and small vans which Glasgow City Council bought or hired at various points from April 2020 to April 2021.
However, they failed to turn a key for up to 15 months and were instead abandoned in local authority-owned Charing Cross and Duke Street car parks.
The council previously stated this was due to strict coronavirus restrictions putting a halt to plans for staff training due to social distancing.
But the local authority has since revealed that these 181 vehicles formed just part of a delivery of a total of 327 vehicles, that arrived in batches over the course of the pandemic.
This was in line with agreements that had been settled prior to March 2020.
A total of 220 are now fully deployed into service across all departments of the council.
In November last year, only 60 of the vehicles had been put out onto the streets.
A council spokesperson said: “We’re hopeful we’ll see further significant progress in the weeks ahead, along with other work to expand our charging infrastructure also underway.
“In terms of our longer-term goals, we have plans for all council vehicles to be zero emissions by the end of 2029, which will include all of our heavy road maintenance and cleansing vehicles.
“Our cars and vans will run on electricity, but the larger vehicles will run on hydrogen, which provides sufficient power to deal with the heavier tasks those vehicles are required to deal with.
“Work is also under way to ensure we have a supply of green hydrogen for our vehicles.
“Green hydrogen is the cleanest form of this type of fuel as it is produced from renewable energy.”
We previously reported that
the council spent £1,018,753 for a three-year contract to hire a share of the 181 eco-friendly vehicles while a further £953,648 was used to buy the remaining members of the fleet of green machines.
It’s not known how many were bought compared with rented.
At the time, opposition councillors slammed their lack of use as “embarrassing” ahead of The 2021 United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP26) being held in the city.