The latest IDTechEx report has projected a rising market for electric vehicles for military, security and police duty. It is expected to be 15 per cent of the total electric vehicle market by value in 2021.

The report said that 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.

The 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, multimode 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 UK, 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.