Sane in the Great Plains: Wyoming Has No plans to Adopt Electric Vehicles

The Wyoming Department of Transportation and other state agencies maintain fleets of thousands of vehicles but recently confirmed that no EVs will be added to its fleets anytime soon due to a lack of infrastructure to support electric vehicles, a position that makes a lot of sense as incidents of battery failures and poor mileage continue to mount.

Cowboy State Daily reports that the Wyoming Department of Transportation and the state of Wyoming maintain separate fleets of thousands of vehicles, most of which are traditional gas-powered vehicles with a few hybrids mixed in. However, due to the lack of infrastructure to support electric vehicles, the state will not be adding EVs to its fleets.

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James Farley, president and chief executive officer of Ford Motor Co., speaks during a launch event for the 2022 Ford F-150 Lightning all-electric truck. Photographer: Emily Elconin/Bloomberg

WYDOT Director Luke Reiner commented: “There’s not adequate infrastructure out there for us to accomplish our mission right now with that type of equipment. And so, at the current time, we’re running on gas.”

Last week, the state received federal approval for its National Electric Vehicle Infrastructure (NEVI) plan which will provide about $26 million over the next five years to improve electric vehicle infrastructure.

WYDOT requested exemptions from the federal requirements that charging stations be placed every 50 miles due to the long stretches of road between towns across the state. Most of the exemption requests were denied.
“There’s a lot of challenges to running an electric vehicle here in the state, and especially if your highway department, you’re going to have a lot of long stretches of road,” Reiner said.

A spokesperson for WYDOT said that the department has approximately 4,000 vehicles in its fleet including everything from trailer trucks to striping trucks.

The problems with EVs are limited to charging infrastructure. In one recent case, an electric Hummer costing $115,000 left its owner stranded in the road after a total system failure.

In a test performed by a YouTuber, a Ford electric truck failed miserably to demonstrate its utility in towing.

As Breitbart News reported:

Once he loaded up the Model A truck and drove it back to his neighborhood, Hoover “got the driving range low warning,” and saw that he only had 50 miles of range left, despite charging the EV for 200 miles at the start of his 64-mile round trip.

“Are you kidding me? That’s almost 90 miles of range in 30 miles. Are you serious? That’s nuts. What a joke,” Hoover reacted.

“So, yeah, that was abysmally bad, and if the future is electric, there has to be some kind of solution for this,” he said. “I have no idea why EVs tow so bad. My guess would be it doesn’t have a normal transmission where there’s gears and a car’s in a lower rev range.”

“If a truck towing 3,500 pounds can’t even go 100 miles — that is ridiculously stupid,” Hoover continued. “This truck can’t do normal truck things. You would be stopping every hour to recharge, which would take about 45 minutes a pop, and that is absolutely not practical.”