Mesa, Arizona, receives first pure battery-electric fire truck in the U.S.
As far as we can tell, America has its first pure battery-electric fire truck, now a part of the Mesa Fire and Medical Department Station 221 in Mesa, Arizona. Los Angeles took delivery of a European-style electric fire truck in May 2022 built by Austrian company Rosenbauer and called the RTX. The L.A. truck, however, is a range-extender EV, housing a 3.0-liter BMW inline-six with 300 horsepower to keep the two Volvo Penta batteries topped up to their 132-kWh combined capacity. Mesa’s new E-One Vector fire truck is powered solely by a 327-kWh battery (316 kWh usable). What’s more, it was designed in the American style and built in Florida by Emergency One, which specializes in construction of all manner of firefighting vehicles and accessories.
The giant pack powers a 400-kW electric motor (536 horsepower) that in turn powers either the rear axle or the pump system. When working the pump, the motor can quickly drain the truck’s 530-gallon onboard water and foam tank. When hooked to a water supply, the pumper can spray a maximum of 1,250 gallons per minute, or run 750 gallons per minute through four hoses for four hours on a full charge. E-One says this is “the longest electric pumping duration in industry.” For fire departments that request a range-extender engine, the maximum flow rate rises to 1,500 gallons per minute and lasts as long as the gasoline does.
Back at the station, equipped with a DC fast charger, the Vector’s 120-kW maximum fast-charge rate can refill its battery in about 3.5 hours.
L.A.’s Rosenbauer RTX truck cost the city $1.2 million. Mesa authorities didn’t divulge a price for the E-One Vector, only noting that funding came from a voter-approved bond issue from 2018 and the city’s general fund. The $1.2M isn’t out of line with current prices for traditional diesel-powered pumpers thanks to remarkable inflation over the past three years, even wilder than that for the car market. A fire department in Sudbury, Ontario, Canada, purchased three pumper trucks in 2020 for $788,010 CAD ($590K U.S.) per truck. In 2022 and 2023, the city council approved buying two more pumper trucks for a combined price of $1.7M CAD ($1.2M USD), accounting for a historic rate of 3% price inflation. When the council finally put out the tenders and got them approved in late 2023, the price of each truck was $1.46M CAD ($1.1M U.S.). A similar thing happened in Connecticut early last year, the Norwalk Fire Department asking for $1.35 million combined for two fire trucks in 2022, but needing to pay $1.84 million by the time of purchase in 2023, on top of seeing its waiting time for delivery go from the usual nine to 12 months to two or three years.
L.A.’s records for its Rosenbauer RTX PHEV show almost entirely electric operation. In the initial six months of service, the RTX’s pure-electric running came to 99% of service time for calls, 98.2% of service time when including all operations and training. Estimates for the current year of operation that ends in March figure a minimum of 96% pure electric operation in all phases of use. Mesa bought its electric fire truck as part of efforts to be carbon neutral by 2050, and as the Vector is all-electric, it should be even higher than L.A.’s high standard when comparing vehicle emissions.
