For 20 years on Grey’s Anatomy, ambulances have been pulling up to the hospital to unload patients to the starring doctors on the long-running ABC medical drama.
That means that, for 20 years, as the real ambulances would idle on set, the crew and actors would be inhaling the diesel fumes that being emitted from the loud, life-saving vehicles. In recent years, the creative team behind Grey’s started asking: Is there a better way to do this?
Flash-forward to season 22 and the creative team led by showrunner Meg Marinis have quietly introduced a new character to the series: an all-electric ambulance. The show partnered with electric vehicle manufacturer Rivian to re-outfit one of their commercial vans into a functioning ambulance. The environmentally friendly upgrade has been featured throughout the currently airing season, first in the Nov. 13, 2025, episode and now with the biggest spotlight on the new Grey Sloan Memorial Hospital ride coming this Thursday. In this week’s episode, titled “Strip That Down,” seasoned doctors Miranda Bailey (Chandra Wilson) and Owen Hunt (Kevin McKidd) lead an instructional ride-along with first responders in the e-ambulance.
“We have been talking about this for a couple of years, to the point where we just stopped filming the ambulance driving up and we would cheat it,” Marinis tells The Hollywood Reporter of the impetus for change away from diesel-fumed ambulances. “We were exposing the cast and crew to these diesel fumes, so we tried to creatively work around it. We would have our doctors coming down a hallway, and then we’d just open the doors. But we lost that awesome feeling of ambulances driving up.”
So the show’s production team began to think of ideas, just as parent company Disney approached them with extra funds from the Climate Sustainability Department. “They said, ‘Do you want to turn your base camp solar?’” Marinis recalls. “We said yes, but that we were also interested in an electric ambulance.”
So the Shondaland-produced series, which has been prioritizing climate change stories onscreen, began conversations with Rivian in 2014, and the e-ambulance took about seven months to custom build. Modifications included removable side and roof panels for shooting, custom-fit lighting and interior finishes, and custom fittings on the van frame to accommodate exterior camera, grip and lighting rigging. Rivians are outfitted with a humming sound for safety to alert passersby, which the Grey’s team disconnected for filming, so while the show’s silent ambulance isn’t exactly street legal, the model is a guide to what ambulances could be in the real world.
“We’re hoping we’re going to start a trend, at least for other TV shows,” says Marinis. “All ambulances do is idle. They idle in parking lots, at convenience stores, they idle outside restaurants. The people inside of them are obviously doing life-saving work, but there’s a cost.”
Marinis says the project was a collaboration across departments, led by production designer John Zachary, construction coordinator Jack Carroll, art director Michael Levinson and co-executive producer/director/actor Linda Klein.
“We had great expectations when we started this project, and we still do, of making the public aware of the importance of using these vehicles that don’t burn fossil fuels and cause pollution and make all this noise,” Zachary tells THR. “We realized as we were researching that there are virtually no ambulances or rescue vehicles or EMT vehicles in the United States that run on electric power. We found a few in Europe, but there were few there as well. As we were developing it, we were thinking, ‘Why don’t they do this?’ In a place like Los Angeles, it would be perfect.”
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