Mill Valley Adds Four Electric Cars to City Fleet

With a car charging station being installed at Hauke Park next week, the city also announced an agreement that added four electric, light-duty compact cars to the municipal fleets.

Mill Valley joins the cities of San Jose, Los Gatos, and Campbell in an agreement to lease the cars for three years without upfront costs in a deal organized by the Bay Area Climate Collaborative, a public-private group in San Jose focusing on clean energy strategies, according to its program manager Claire Barton.

Under the pact, 38 of the 50 battery-operated Japanese cars are going to the big city of San Jose, five to Los Gatos, three to Campbell, and four to Mill Valley, Barton said.

In Mill Valley, the new Mitsubishi i-MIEV ES four-door hatchbacks arrived a few weeks ago, and are being used to replace inefficient former police vehicles as general city purpose and employee carpool vehicles. 

“The City of Mill Valley is pleased to deploy these all-electric vehicles, reflecting the Council’s core value of environmental conservation and sustainability,” Mill Valley Mayor Andrew Berman said in a statement. “The need for green transportation alternatives represents a global issue and is more critical than ever. Integrating EVs into the City fleet makes both economic and environmental sense, and we will encourage other local governments to join us in doing the same.”

The agreement is part of a partnership between media trade company Active International, Mitsubishi Motors of North America, and Mike Albert, according to a Mill Valley staff report.

The first year of the $3,000 per car lease will be paid for by Active and the city will pay for registration. Two-thirds of the second year will be covered by a $2,000 per vehicle state rebate payment and the third year of the program will be the responsibility of the city, according to the report. 

The 50 cars, meant for light-duty use by city employees, are a part of series of deployments of about 250 electric cars elsewhere in the Bay Area the collaborative hopes to make over the next year, Barton said.

The effort is being promoted as a way to make the Bay Area the electric vehicle "capital of the U.S." and support a goal set by Gov. Jerry Brown of 1.5 million electric vehicles operating statewide by 2025, Barton said.

Mitsubishi vehicles run by lithium-ion batteries that can go for
about 62 miles between charges, said David Patterson, chief engineer for
Mitsubishi Motors.

The emission-free cars may be charged slowly at home or much faster at charging stations, including the one currently being installed.

Mitsubishi currently sells its i-MiEV at a base price in the low $20,000s and in the low $30,000s for high-end models, Patterson said. 

Rafael Reyes, executive director of the collaborative, said that the 50 cars together would save the four cities $110,000 in fuel expenses and cut carbon dioxide emissions by almost 400,000 pounds over three years.

The idea for the electric car lease deal came from the collaborative, a consortium that includes the non-profit Silicon Valley Leadership Group, the mayors of San Francisco, San Jose and Oakland and companies such as Bank of America as members, Barton said. 

The collaborative contacted Active International, a New York company that negotiates trades of corporate services and marketing to reduce costs, and Mike Albert Fleet Solutions, a fleet management firm from Cincinnati, to develop a low cost way for the cities to use electric cars, said Amanda Savercool, a spokeswoman for Mitsubishi.

Active negotiated the cities' low-cost leases through corporate service trades with Mitsubishi Motors of North America chief executive Yoichi Yokozawa and Mike Albert helped the cities get better terms on the leases, Savercool said.