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Electric Vehicles for Military, Security, Police

  • Apr 29, 2011
The latest IDTechEx report concerns electric vehicles for military, security and police duty. Even excluding regular hybrid and pure electric cars minimally modified for such use and the excluding the huge development contracts, the IDTechEx projections show a strongly rising market. It becomes around 15 percent of the total electric vehicle market by value in 2021, primarily due to the high prices attracted by the specialist constructions for land, sea and air use that are involved. 

Although the bulk of this demand will be for military vehicles on land, the water and airborne applications will each become businesses of well over one billion dollars yearly within the decade. The report emphasises the need to benchmark best practice between each of these modes and gives a large number of examples.

Interestingly, unmanned operation is very important, particularly for water craft and aircraft. Both hybrid electric and pure electric drive trains will be deployed in large numbers.

This unique report makes sense of the bewildering variety of electric vehicles used and about to be used for military, security and police purposes, whether hybrid or pure electric. Huge numbers of micro and nanobots will be deployed for surveillance and other military tasks making countermeasures almost impossible. Most of these will fly. Indeed tens of millions of dollars are being spent developing robot hummingbirds and bats alone. Autonomous Underwater Vehicles AUVs cost up to $5 million each and are already bought in thousands for search and rescue. Add to that Unmanned Aerial Vehicles UAVs such as solar planes and the $517 million Northrop Grumman solar military airship, now being built, are an even more important part of this story. They are used for surveillance and AUVs in the upper atmosphere are a fraction of the cost of a surveillance satellite. 

At the other extreme, hand launched surveillance aircraft are electric for reliability and silence and over $400 million has already been spent on them. All are driving a rapid change in technology of parts and powertrains as is explained in many summary tables and text in the report. For instance, multi-mode energy harvesting is being increasingly deployed. 

Although most of the development, manufacture and purchase of these vehicles takes place in the USA, unique advances in Singapore, Korea, the U.K., Germany, Switzerland, Canada, New Zealand and elsewhere are explained in the report including the many electric vehicles for dual purpose civil and military applications, often where the civil application first pushes the boundaries of what is possible. The market numbers, unit prices and total value are forecasted for 2011-2021 for each segment of this market and major relevant events in the next ten years are scoped. In a balanced view, the problems and impediments are analysed as well as the heroic objectives. Many tables and figures explain and compare what over 120 participants are up to and how the technological options match up. There is one hour of free consultation for those wishing to learn more after absorbing this easy to read, comprehensive report on the market needs, technology and progress in this subject.

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