Queensland’s police fleet electrifies

THE Queensland Police Service (QPS) vehicle fleet operation is unique in that the agency owns its $200-plus-million fleet outright, allowing greater purchasing flexibility and a more diverse range of vehicles that now includes a large – and growing – proportion of hybrid and electric models.

Its embracing of electrification has also been pragmatic, pushing back on the state government’s desire for the QPS vehicle fleet to go net-zero by 2026 in favour of a more achievable 2030 target.

Complete electrification is not viable in the short- to mid-term, both for rural applications as well as use for applications that require around-the-clock use, QPS assistant commissioner of the Organisational Capability Command Matthew Vanderbyl told GoAuto during an all-access tour of the main QPS fleet facility in Brisbane.

“When the government comes to me I throw up a degree of fundamental operational considerations to resist going to full battery electric by 2026, then I can point to the hybridisation program. But we’re the only agency in Australia to have done that,” he said.

“And it’s not going to be zero emissions, either, it will be net zero. So I can offset that with other programmes that we are under like rooftop solar or hybridisation, because we are always going to have a fairly heavy reliance as an agency on diesel and heavy four-wheel driving.”

Following the closure of Ford and Holden factories in Australia, a hurdle QPS has faced since transitioning to a mixed fleet has been the lack of OEM involvement compared with the days of domestic manufacturing.

“We shifted from the rear-wheel drive, Australian-made Commodore and Falcon paradigm to a paradigm where right-hand drive vehicles, probably only a single-digit percentage of global production, are all made offshore,” explained Mr Vanderbyl.

“So our ability to influence vehicles, which are made specifically for policing purposes the way some Commodores and Falcon used to be, given our overall positioning in the market, is very, very little now – it's practically gone,” he said.

“We were a big player in the R&D market to those companies (Holden and Ford), but we’ve lost that, so we’ve got to work out new ways of collaborating.”

To that end, the QPS facility at Alderley on Brisbane’s northside is home to a major fleet workshop, where teams of in-house staff and contractors piece together a range of specialised police vehicles for use across the state, as well as housing a diverse range of vehicles already in in police service as well as some new additions we can expect to see on Queensland roads in the near future.

A key driver of QPS’ fleet advantage is that it owns the assets, compared with some of the other states and territories which lease vehicles.

“We own our fleet and have advocated very strongly over the years to keep it that way, because the diversity of our fleet here in Queensland is unlike any other, other than, say, Western Australia,” said Mr Vanderbyl. 

“The type of vehicle that would suit a road policing unit out of Charleville would be different to what you would use at City Station, Toowoomba, or wherever.

“A lot goes into the thinking, for things like our special operations vehicles that go to public safety response teams or special emergency response teams. 

“Then you get the district duty office vehicle, the rural and remote general duty vehicle, and the beauty about owning our fleet is we are not bound to a number on a lease.”

Electric roadmap

QPS recently acquired five Kia EV6 models and in 2021 it trialled five hydrogen fuel-cell Hyundai Nexo crossovers. However, commissioning of the battery electric vehicles (BEV) is proving challenging. 

The hurdle with BEV models, according to Mr Vanderbyl, is engineering various electronics into the vehicles while ensuring they remain safe and compliant. 

“We’re working closely with our fitment providers to ensure that the wiring that goes into those cars is fit for purpose and to work out what the drawdown is from a radio, LEDs, iPads and the like,” he explained. 

“Just to engineer the installation of that equipment has proven to be enormously complex.”

So complex, in fact, that QPS is working with a police department in the UK which is also fitting out EV6 models for use on-road, a collaborative effort brokered by Kia. 

“We’ll go over there because they’re in the same stage as us, they’re just trying to actually turn that vehicle into a police vehicle. From a commissioning perspective it’s very challenging,” said Mr Vanderbyl. 

QPS premiered the canary yellow EV6 GT-Line models – a tribute to the yellow XD Ford Falcon and VL Holden Commodores police cars of the 1980s – escorting the Queensland Origin team to Suncorp Stadium in Brisbane, which scored plenty of attention. 

“It was a conversation starter. You put these at the exhibition at the RNA and everyone wants to come and talk about it or get a photo with it,” said Mr Vanderbyl. 

“We started with Kia models because they had the product available to us, but we’ll go to others now.”

On the hybrid front, QPS already operates a range of models like the Toyota Camry, Toyota RAV4, Toyota Kluger and Mitsubishi Outlanders, although the push is to transition to plug-in hybrid (PHEV) models.

QPS recently ordered 45 MG HS Plus EV SUVs, marking the beginning of its PHEV focus, also installing charging infrastructure at police stations where required.

“Plug-in hybrid will increase because there are more hybrid and plug-in hybrids available across a wider range of models and makes, particularly in the SUV area,” said Mr Vanderbyl. 

The move to hybrid models gained serious pace in 2021, when QPS purchased a large number of Camry models, offering significant savings both in terms of fuel spend and emissions. 

“It was a quantum reduction. That's a cashable saving, but also, from my perspective, it's also non-cashable saving in terms of emissions reduction,” said Mr Vanderbyl. 

“Even now, while our petrol bills are going up because the cost of petrol is up, our consumption is going down.”

From a reliability perspective, QPS evaluations have found hybrid models to be equally reliable when compared with petrol and diesel equivalents.

“There is no performance gain or decrease, but there are fuel and emissions savings. Whether they are driven hard or not, they offer very consistent fuel use numbers,” said Mr Vanderbyl. 

“We have a very heavy focus on emissions on us at the moment as part of a broader government remit, so I think that 75 per cent (hybrid) will grow.”

Smart shopping

Because QPS operates a buy-and-sell fleet model, on-selling a vehicle before it procures another, it is incentivised to make calculated buying decisions.

“When you’ve got to sell a car in order to buy a car, that drives us to buy the best car in terms of resale for what is an average timeframe of two years and eight months away,” said Mr Vanderbyl. 

“If we can be really shrewd in how we buy it, commission it, use it and sell it at the right time in its lifecycle, using a provider to make sure that the vehicle is sold into the right used market, we can maximise our resale.”

Owning the assets outright also offers significant insurance cost savings, with police vehicles exposed to damage and severe duty use.

“A lot of our vehicles get damaged during duty, so that makes leasing prohibitively expensive from an insurance perspective. Whereas we have a private insurer,” Mr Vanderbyl explained.

After police cars are taken off the road – around every three years depending on the vehicle – the decommissioning process returns vehicles to stock guise before Manheim Auctions on-sells them. 

“The income on sales in the last few years has been really beneficial to us, because we can then reinvest that money into better products and newer products.”

Intelligent fleet management and solid resale have enabled QPS to not only modernise and future-proof its car parc, but it has also grown its fleet by more than 10 per cent in the past two years. 

“Our fleet is at 3300 vehicles now, so if you went to any police agency in Australia and said ‘do you want 300 more cars?’ they’d fall over. But when you’re running it as a commercial operation that you buy and sell, you can do it,” said Mr Vanderbyl. 

For QPS, the fleet buying puzzle is more complex than other corporate or government entities, because many of the vehicles are operating around the clock while carrying a significant amount of extra weight. 

“These are the three principles that stick in my mind: Number one a car has got to be safe and fit for purpose; two is operational effectiveness and efficiency; and three is public value,” said Mr Vanderbyl. 

“We also put a lot of weight into our cars, so we've got to think it through. They carry a lot of equipment – the ballistic vest tray, automatic number plate recognition, multiple radios.”

Public perception is something QPS takes seriously, too, opting for vehicles that offer function over form, choosing value over excess.

“It has to be of good public value because we are spending public money. We’re not going to go out and buy a whole lot of indulgent vehicles that tank on resale in two years, because you don’t get money back on option packs,” said Mr Vanderbyl. 

“This is government money, so we’re not going to go out there and buy a fleet of Range Rovers.”

Commissioning process

Instead of looking to vehicle manufacturers for customised solutions, QPS now leans on the aftermarket to modify and equip vehicles for law enforcement, as well as undertaking a stringent validation process to ensure a vehicle is fit for purpose.

“It's easier to work with the support industries, to actually particularise a car or specialise a car for the particular purposes,” said Mr Vanderbyl. 

QPS fits out vehicles at both its Alderley facility and workshops across the state, leaning on and working with aftermarket providers to innovate across lights, sirens, imaging, storage and more. 

The sheer number of vehicles being fitted out drives aftermarket and specialist manufacturers to constantly push the envelope, with QPS opting for the “latest and greatest” fitout options.

“We work with industry to get cutting-edge products because if they know we'll have 300 to 400 cars coming in the next six months or so, they’re pretty keen and they want to work with us,” said Mr Vanderbyl. 

Commissioning is factored into a vehicle's total cost of ownership, while also needing to be removable prior to sale, with many of the parts being refurbished and reused where suitable.

“We outsource a lot of our commissioning, which can cost seven to 10 grand before it can go out and do police work with things like lights, sirens, electronics,” said Mr Vanderbyl. 

“A lot of that work is outsourced because we have such volume coming through the pipeline, particularly as supply chains catch up. On a good year we’d do 1100 to 1200 cars.”