Converting bus to electric (EV)

[Mountain Gnome]

I felt bad today for btchn about the boomers. Not every boomer. Just the generation in general. MY parents... I remember taking bottles back to the grocery store to be re-used; not recycled, not thrown away. But I was too young to make decisions that their generation did, and by the time I could, all we had were plastic bottles. Those decisions to create, and then buy, plastic bottles (for just one example) changed the market. My mom will still use paper towels, maybe even two big ones for a small spill. Can't convince her otherwise. Won't get a re-usable grocery bag. "Too hard." "too lazy!"



Too pitiful, IMO. No respect there. However, not much of any respect for her in general. But that goes back to over 40 years of .... abuse. You don't want to know. But you wouldn't know it if you met her. (if I could just leave this hell-hole, but for COVID, health issues, rain rain and more rain delaying my 2-month build-out to 2 years, etc...)



However, the "hippies" fought against this care-less selfish mindset from day one, and they are "boomers" also.


I find it interesting that even Mexico has enough self-respect to outlaw single-use plastics. If they would just clean up their smoke-stacks. My truck turned flat-grey after driving through Monterrey on a rainy day, from the industrial pollution there. It took 10 years to wash off.


Somehow, this has to do with skoolies....

 

[Elliot Naess]

Far more importantly, it has to do with life -- of which skoolies are only a tiny and incidental part.

I also returned glass bottles to the store as a matter of routine. And the bottles were reused indefinitely (so long as they passed sanitation inspection, of course). Some bottles looked like they had been sandblasted around the shoulder and bottom "rings" where they rubbed against each other in the wooden boxes -- which did not harm the beverage or bother anyone in the least.

The good news is... the tide has finally turned. Except for current Covid conditions, reusable canvas grocery bags are becoming the norm here in Northern California.

I can still see before my inner eye the bright green wooden cart my grandmother used to bring groceries home from the store. My grandfather built it, of course.

 

[s2mikon]

Don't get me started on grocery bags. These GD plastic things are a pain in the ass here in southern NM. We have wind most of the time and they blow around everywhere. I am a ham operator and have found them 40 foot high wrapped around my antennas. To keep this bus related, I had a heating problem not severe but higher than normal, on my last bus and when I pulled over to check it was a plastic grocery bag sucked flat against the radiator. I have had them wrap around the exhaust of the car and melt and stink. Back in the 60's my dad would shred the paper bags and till them in to the garden soil, along with saw dust to help keep the moisture in the soil. In today's covid environment some stores have suspended their use. If you use canvas grocery bags you should wash them between use for sanitary reasons. Again another law suit. And the reusable deposit bottles? I remember 5 cent bottles, collected them along the road side for enough money for a pop and peanuts every Saturday. Our milk was delivered in glass bottles. What happened to the reusable bottles? Law suits. People found penlight batteries, rodents and pencils in them. Hence the change to non returnable glass bottles. These found their way into lakes and streams and people got injured and filed torts against the bottlers and land owners. Their answer was plastic. Same with medical supplies. 100% disposable now. And now we have used masks floating around in our lakes and rivers. The real problem is people that just don't give a damn. And not any particular generation either. We could go back to reusable bottles tomorrow, but how do you stop people from putting trash in the bottles? We could go to non reusable glass, it recycles very well, but nobody wants to put a sizable deposit on them. It might impact sales. With today's inflated dollars you would have to have a 50 cent deposit per bottle. Maybe more. And yet even then some dumb ass would toss it out the window of his car onto the road and break it. Every city in America has a recycling system now yet... I'll save that for another sermon. Stay well.

 

[Elliot Naess]

What he said. The problem is us -- we humans.
But, with a little luck, we will soon exterminate ourselves.

I am currently reading a history of warfare, with a side order of cultural anthropology. We are careening down an evolutionary dead end.

Meanwhile....
Sporadic improvements such as electric propulsion (based on profit opportunity) and democratic government (idealism) keeps prolonging our misery:
https://www.schoolbusfleet.com/1013...009&utm_content=01&oly_enc_id=2137J2758601J3W

 

[Sehnsucht-SKO]

Not to open a can of worms here but aren't we looking at the endgame for humanity right now? If it's not the environmental devastation then it's the designer viruses they swear wasn't lab-produced but mutates unlike anything ever seen in nature to actively thwart vaccination. Quite frankly I'm cheering for the virus because the planet deserves better species than humans.

 

[Elliot Naess]

A few days ago, I tossed in the garbage-can a novel -- hard-bound, no less -- after reading barely half of it.

Published in 2009, it had a Chinese crime syndicate attempting to take over the government of China and then conquer the World by unleashing a designer coronavirus similar to SARS and at the same time controlling a sure-fire cure for it. The virus escaped from their lab prematurely, setting off a helter-skelter "car-chase train-wreck" of action-thriller events.

The novel might have been amusing if it had not been so crudely written. (It was a best-seller, of course -- catering to the crude intellects of the readership, it seems safe to say.)

The fact that even a pair of bottom-feeding novelists were able to predict such a scenario....

And I am knowingly contributing to the drift and delinquency of this thread, yes. :whistling:

 

[Elliot Naess]

The painful thing is....
There are sensible people among us.

In 2019, my Burning Man camp comprised 14 of us.
Of my 13 camp-mates, there were three Doctors of Medicine and an astrophysicist.
Two of the MDs have spent many years all over the World with Medecins Sans Frontieres.
One camp-mate is a radio commentator on PBS.
The rest are not far behind in level-headedness and general competence.

There is hope!

But there are so few of these people, and they tend to be quiet, modest, and philosophical. They lead by example, but so few are able to recognize good examples from bad ones.
This is where public education comes in. I would be in favor of it.

 

[Elliot Naess]

Back to electric propulsion.

I keep an eye on news in Norway (where I grew up).
They are apparently having a colder than average winter, and many cars refuse to start -- even brand new cars. Brand new electric cars. The most-sold brand of car in Norway these days is Tesla.

The news-article talks about dead start batteries. In electric cars. They need to be jump started, just like fossil cars sometimes need.
I can only speculate that these cars have a separate and isolated battery for incidental functions such as relays controlling the propulsion functions.

Too much emphasis on bells-&-whistles over basic dependable functionality, I suspect.

(The photo appears to show an electric VW.)

 

[BeNimble]

vw surpassed tesla in norway in sales. the teslas would only start if you deposit one bitcoin in the change drawer after the latest software upgrade was automatically downloaded on feb 6, 2021.

 

[Sehnsucht-SKO]

Wait, I'm confused... What exactly is being 'started' on an electric car?? If the battery is dead from cold temperature then it's just dead. Like dead dead. However I would have imagined that if it was plugged in to charge then the charging function would cause some thermic effect that would 'thaw' the batteries unless they just don't deal with cold well in any event. That's not going to make electric cars very popular in cold climates.

From what I've read about electric city bus projects around the US is that one of the biggest disappointments is the reduction in range in cold weather. In Indianapolis they just launched the all-electric Red Line BRT fleet and back a few years ago when they were still road testing the buses during the winter they were very disappointed with the real world range versus the manufacturer's claims. Then it dawned on them that they were disappointed while driving around EMPTY BUSES! So they put weights in them and were further disappointed. The bus manufacturer made a concession and chipped in for rapid chargers to be installed at the stations so while the buses are stopped they can get some quick charge time but last I heard the city was still unhappy with the overall useable range of these buses before they had to go back to the garage for a full charge. If there's one saving grace in all this, it's that as soon as they started charging full fares the ridership dropped like a rock so those buses aren't often very full. But they were quite popular during the great launch event when they offered free rides all summer long.

One other factor relating to batteries in the cold, my company's trucks have two plugs, one is the engine block heater but the other is a shorepower connection for running the convenience loads and recharging both the starter batteries and house batteries. Even if parked and vacant for the weekend, they like the shorepower connected because they say trickle charging the batteries warms them enough that they don't get so cold they fail. I've never needed a jump start so I'll buy it.

 

[Elliot Naess]

Europe has many electric cars which we never hear of in the US.
A friend in Norway recently bought an electric Skoda -- a Czech brand owned by Volkswagen. The model is of course based on a VW-corporation-wide design.

 

[Elliot Naess]

Decades ago, I moved from the 60th Parallel North to the 38th... for a reason. ;-)

 

[BeNimble]

There are battery chemistries that have no problem at low temperatures,
just like there are chemistries that can recharge in 10 minutes.

An electric car has a 12v system to run the electronics, like for example, used to turn on the high voltage battery. A small lead acid battery is cheap and effective for this.

 

[Ronnie-SKO]

I wonder what kind of temperatures they were having in Norway? A friend of mine has several Teslas for his business and has never had any trouble with cold weather not starting, or range issues.

 

[Elliot Naess]

I see mention of Minus 33 Celsius three days ago. That equals Minus 27 Fahrenheit.
This is inland and north in the country.
The southern and coastal areas enjoy milder weather.

 

[Mountain Gnome]

I just heard on the radio that an electric school bus was on display today in Georgia. I didn't catch everything, but heard Daimler was involved. I think they said battery powered. The GA officials were touting using "GA electricity" to run the buses. Electricity made in GA from coal and natural gas mined elsewhere. I'll be looking for more on this.

 

[BeNimble]

I just heard on the radio that an electric school bus was on display today in Georgia. I didn't catch everything, but heard Daimler was involved. I think they said battery powered. The GA officials were touting using "GA electricity" to run the buses. Electricity made in GA from coal and natural gas mined elsewhere. I'll be looking for more on this.

So in about 10-15 years it might come up at auction for $50,000 (the price of buses in 2045) to make into a Skoolie, but then you can buy a 5 year old EV Motorhome for $40,000 in 2035. :wink1:

 

[Mountain Gnome]

Another fuel-cell electric truck/bus manufacturer coming to the us:


https://techcrunch.com/2021/03/01/hyzon-motors-hydrogen-fuel-ambitions-include-two-us-factories/