electric buses

[Sleddgracer]

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/briti...leet-1.5229665

[PNW_Steve]

https://www.blue-bird.com/electric

[o1marc]

Originally Posted by PNW_Steve

https://www.blue-bird.com/electric

120 mile range with a 6-8 hour recharge.

[PNW_Steve]

Originally Posted by o1marc

120 mile range with a 6-8 hour recharge.

Yep......

Another member made the observation that, given current technology, battery electric buses are only practical for short, local routes.


Some serious breakthroughs need to happen in battery and charging technology before we will be driving cross country in elecric buses.

Has anyone seen any activity on diesel-electric buses? Similar to a train locomotive?

Or a hybrid setup like a Prius?

[Sehnsucht]

Originally Posted by PNW_Steve

Yep......

Another member made the observation that, given current technology, battery electric buses are only practical for short, local routes.


Some serious breakthroughs need to happen in battery and charging technology before we will be driving cross country in elecric buses.

Has anyone seen any activity on diesel-electric buses? Similar to a train locomotive?

Or a hybrid setup like a Prius?

The hybrid electric is what I'm looking for.

[Ninjakitty]

Bluebird said MSRP is $325k~ per bus

[cadillackid]

I rode the Prototype Electric blue-bird at the NAPT show in columbus in 2017, it was a pretty neat bus, however the skirted the issue of cabin heat.. they wouldnt tell me how much range the heaters ate up.. from crawling around looking at its air-conditioners it looked like they were heat pumps.. but up here in ohio on those 6 degree mornings Heat pumps would be useless for heating and defrosting.



but I asked twice of the nice Bluebird rep and all i got was "this bus stays very comfortable in the winter.. "...


when I had my chevy volt, the heater is what ate the battery range alive.. that little car has a 6000 watt heater.. i cant imagine the heating capacity required for a 84 passenger flat nose bus..



I know in my short busses I have a couple hundred thousand btu of heaters..



-Christopher

[Kubla]

Hopefully they use heat pumps like my E-golf does

[2kool4skool]

Are electrics really ready for prime time?

I know of a guy that has a restored Baker and a Chevy Volt, over 100 years separates these cars. His quote: "Both my Baker and the Chev Volt go 40 miles on the home charge." Admittedly one goes a lot faster.
I don't have any prejudice regarding electrics, just find these type comments interesting and thought provoking. I'd love to have an electric motorcycle....Someday.

[david.dgeorge07]

Originally Posted by 2kool4skool

Are electrics really ready for prime time?

I know of a guy that has a restored Baker and a Chevy Volt, over 100 years separates these cars. His quote: "Both my Baker and the Chev Volt go 40 miles on the home charge." Admittedly one goes a lot faster.
I don't have any prejudice regarding electrics, just find these type comments interesting and thought provoking. I'd love to have an electric motorcycle....Someday.

I have a Leaf and my friend has a Tesla. Battery tech is reaching the tipping point, and electric cars are already vastly superior to combustion powered vehicles in almost every other way.

If the general public was currently driving electric vehicles and was faced with switching to combustion power there would be no end to the gripes about lack of power, safety, cost, maintenance, and noise.

[Sehnsucht]

Originally Posted by 2kool4skool

Are electrics really ready for prime time?

I think there are a number of factors and they'll become more pressing as electrification increases. Beyond the current discussion of battery range there's also the matter of the electrical utility grid required to support an increasing number of electric vehicles. Right now electric cars aren't even one percent of the cars on the road and that's just cars, not even trucks or buses. If one percent increases to five percent or ten percent, what kind of demand is that going to put on the national grid to keep up? And what type of energy is going to meet that demand? In many cases the tailpipe emissions are just replaced by smokestack emissions because American power utilities are as polluting as the cars themselves. So whether its battery evolution or energy evolution, the problem remains that energy costs in terms of its environmental impact no matter where it's produced.

Along those same lines, there's an environmental toll mining for the rare earth elements necessary to make the batteries and motors and solar panels and virtually every other component necessary to make 'clean' electric cars reality. Imagine a century ago when cheap and easy oil near the earth's surface made petroleum an easily accessible and abundant energy solution but now oil companies must work harder and drill deeper for every barrel. Now imagine switching off oil and switching on electric transportation - it probably won't take a century to get to the same mathematical delta which makes mining the elements an ever more costly proposition. And this is without considering the immediate consequences seen today with the mining required. The only difference as I see it is that we don't see the cost firsthand so we don't acknowledge it but it exists nonetheless probably in some third world country who's not even reaping the benefits.

And keeping reality in check, what happens to the millions of internal combustion vehicles now made obsolete? The landfills and junkyards will be overflowing but with no new IC vehicles there's no incentive to recycle their parts. At best they'll be parted out and sorted by their components, metals and plastics recycled while oils and fluids will basically be waste products someone will have to deal with but with no profit incentive it'll end up a government oversight debacle which will probably turn into a superfund bailout.

And that's just a few of the obvious factors. No doubt there's others that haven't occurred to me yet but may be more apparent to others. Therefore, in my opinion, a slow methodical adoption of electric transportation is better all around than a legislative impetus without weighing all the factors. With time these issues can develop solutions that make them environmentally satisfactory while also being financially sound.

[Mark_In_MA]

I'm still not totally sold on electric buses yet.

Electric cars are getting pretty darn good. 300 mile range, and you can charge 80% of that in 20-30 minutes? That would be charging once a week for my normal driving, and if I needed a road trip, I could get used to a half-hour nap/stretch/reading break rather then a 10-minute bathroom break every couple of hours.

There's still a lot of issues to be worked out - battery management is one of them. Mining the minerals isn't perfect, and I'm not sure what exactly the recycling process is for lithium. (It's pretty darn efficient for lead-acid batteries.)

I also want to see people/companies get better at figuring out how to do individual cell replacement/repair, since most of the large "batteries" are really a ton of tiny, smaller cells wired together. You can fix/replace the one bad cell rather then just throw the whole thing away.


I don't totally see all-electric for buses yet because I think the batteries just aren't big enough, lack the range, and/or heating/cooling capacity for the students. Most school buses don't have AC around here, and it's not uncommon to see them with the bibs on the radiators in the winter (especially when they don't want them to idle.) Plus there's also the issue that fueling a current bus fleet involves a dude in a tanker truck driving around a parking lot, while the electrical draw of charging the same fleet overnight would be HUGE. Our energy infrastructure isn't there yet. I'm really interested to see how all-electric transit buses do - I see them on the market, but I want to see how they're doing 5 or 6 years from now.

I'd also rather NOT rush in to regulations and things - like those stupid curly CFL light bulbs. They suck. Now everything is LED, which is brighter, cheaper, and so far, seems to last longer. Reducing energy consumption on lighting was a great idea, but the tech behind it wasn't ready.

Hybrid diesel-electric systems have been popular in transit buses for a while now (3 or 4 years now I think. . .). One of the benefits that they were supposed to have was the elimination of the standard transmission - one less major component to repair. As far as I can tell in Boston, I like them. They're much smoother, I think they also can have electric braking, and some of the newest models (not sure if they're hybrid) even have start-stop technology - which I actually don't like. It's annoying listening to the bus start up every 3 blocks after it comes to a red light.