Vienna to shift entire municipal vehicle fleet to electric mode, starting 2025

The city will stop buying fossil fuel vehicles and start a slow transition to meet its climate neutrality goals by 2040

Yesterday, Jürgen Czernohorszky, Vienna’s City Councillor for Climate Change announced that the city’s vehicle fleet is going electric.  According to Councillor Czernohorszky, Vienna will stop buying new vehicles that run on fossil fuels from 2025. The move is part of Vienna’s push for climate neutrality by 2040.  

There is a notable exception to this policy though, as some specific service vehicles lack emissions-free counterparts, most notably, those employed in the winter maintenance service. The city plans an opt-out in these cases, however, as Czernohorszky has stated that with rising demand across the EU, he believed that these alternatives would become available soon enough.

Some of the vehicles are already electric

Vienna’s municipal vehicle fleet has a total of 3,000 vehicles. This includes garbage trucks, passenger cars vans, street cleaning and etc. According to a statement by the city, 125 of those are already electric, with the majority (82) being cars. The rest are special vehicles and trucks.

The most notable example of the electrification of the municipal vehicle fleet are the two electric garbage trucks. The first truck came into service two years ago, while the second one was introduced last summer.

The trucks highlight some of the issues surrounding the move, according to Andreas Kuba, the deputy department head of MA 48, the city’s waste authority. Kuba explained to ORF that these trucks were twice as expensive as their fossil fuel counterparts. This would make equipping the entire city with an electric fleet quite costly.

Meanwhile, Vienna University of Technology has conducted feasibility research into electric trucks and has found out that they perform positively. For instance, the vehicle battery life did not deteriorate due to weather fluctuation in winter and their range proved to be sufficient to meet the demands of daily operations. According to researchers, apart from the price, the electric trucks were in no way inferior to their fossil fuel counterparts.