No more Renault Kangoos and Peugeot 5008s. In Mandelieu-la-Napoule (Alpes-Maritimes), municipal police officers now drive Tesla Model 3s. This is what mayor Sébastien Leroy revealed in a publication on -Twitter) this Sunday, boasting of being the first municipality to equip its police with it. In total, four vehicles were acquired by the city, which assures in an article in Numerama that it chose Elon Musk's automobile firm because “the French manufacturers did not see fit to respond” to its call for tenders.
If Teslas may seem flashy to municipal police officers, the city assures that these Model 3s will perfectly meet their needs. “A municipal police car works 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. First of all, we have an ecological reason, we needed to reduce our emissions (carbon). There is also an economic reason: we are talking about 650 euros of fuel per month and per vehicle. Adopting electric vehicles will allow us to reduce this amount by ten,” Pierre Boutillon, director of Mandelieu Public Security, assured Numerama.
According to the municipal official, these electric vehicles would also save money on maintenance costs. “Our use is mainly urban and this has a huge impact on the particle filters and the clutch. We had very significant costs. Last year, we paid the equivalent of a new car in repairs,” he told our colleagues at Numerama.
Concerning the battery and recharging of the vehicles, Pierre Boutillon assures that the four cars will only rarely be used all at the same time by the municipal police officers. Enough to ensure rotation and recharge them in turn. The director of Public Safety is also banking on “slow charging to preserve the battery” and keep his Teslas as long as possible. According to him, the old Mandelieu municipal police vehicles had a lifespan of five years.
“It’s a shame that the French manufacturers did not respond to our call for tenders,” the mayor of Mandelieu-la-Napoulle wrote on X.
