Disclosure: im an engine mechanic for a small chain of diesel truck repair shops in the midwest. ive also done fleet maintenance for a city bus fleet.
The reasons electric buses arent seen more often are many, and they arent political at all.
- Tooling. Fleets generally maintain all the tooling necessary for specific make model and design of a vehicle. if that fleet gets large enough, they get a seat at the manufacturers table to help steer development and ensure a sustainable product that doesnt increase rider cost or decrease economy/comfort. Battery fleets would mean having to outfit shops with new training for high voltage, arc/flash suits, hot-sticks and other tools. Youre likely going to need to hire a few electricians to train and oversee people as well.
- lifecycle maintenance. As a fleet mechanic I know down to the day, minute, and hour when my motors are clapped out and when everything needs to be replaced. Diesel engines can run for several million miles if well maintained, but the lifecycle on a fleet electric vehicle is quite a bit more limited. A Cushman or Toyota fork lift for example is often entirely electric and sees a similar duty cycle (high tork, long service, low speed.) Replacement batteries are provided from a third party every year or two. Fleet operators in most US cities havent the slightest idea what the real-world operations lifecycle is for an electric bus. Its likely going to be pretty poor if youre operating these busses in places like Wisconsin winters or Arizona summers.
- Again, Tooling. If you told me I was in charge of a fleet of electric buses id probably quit. Youre talking about 50-60 busses for a small city, so youll need a set of substations dedicated for high speed charging. youll need your own PPD (Physical Plant maintenance) to handle generators during power outages, cooling during summer, and general repair. Your existing diesel fleet just requires a fuel dump and an apprentice mechanic. Youre also going to need to understand how to dispose of something that can, if punctured, explode into flames. Most oil recyclers in fleet operations pay you for the oil you give them and grant a discount on the new stuff. Ive never seen a fleet battery contractor for forklifts that has ever done more than pickup, drop off, and fees.
Ok. I actually drive an electric bus at a u.s. college, we have an all electric fleet of 20 electric buses. Sure it isnt a massive amount, but I believe the opposite about maintenance. They are much simpler to work on, and the batteries actually have a longer life span than the batteries in tesla and such, though I will agree that range is much worse than diesel buses. There are more initial setup costs involved, but in the long run electric will be the way to go.
Conflating lead-acid with lithium ion is a mistake; they're very different technologies. LiIon Battery durability is getting better at a very fast rate, and proper heating/cooling is a big part of that.
But the overall message is sound: you have to commit to a very different infrastructure if you want to make the change. Cities with an aging and/or poorly maintained diesel fleet are going to be better suited to making a 'clean break'.
China is pushing it through because it's a long-term investment. That makes sense for them. That doesn't mean that bus electrification is going to happen rapidly in the US.
China is building whole new cities, and is still rapidly expanding the existing ones. It’s much easier to start from scratch with the latest technology when you don’t always have a big sunk investment in an older system.
Yep, it's the same reason many developing nations don't have any serious landline telephone infrastructure, but everyone has a smartphone. They didn't have landlines before, so as they got richer at the same time cellphones came along, they just skipped over the older technology and went straight to the new one.
Everything here could have been similarly said about the change from horse-drawn buses to internal combustion. Wah - you can't just have a stable-boy feed them hay! Wah - you can't just clean up after them with a broom! Wah - you'll need to train people used to dealing with horses to deal with engines.
I don't think moaning about having to get new tools or training is particularly helpful in the grand scheme of things. If you are going to spend money on new buses, spending money on new tools is a given.
Buses seem like such a no-brainer for electrification, I'd hate to think that we're carrying on with diesel polluting our air and killing us just because the mechanics are losing their shit over having to do something new. Please wake up.
Your reply is a bit snarky but I do tend to agree - and in fact if I was the GP I'd see it as an opportunity. Skill up on electric fleet maintenance, maybe do a certification, speak at a conference or two and suddenly you're an expert for ICE-to-electric fleet conversions, of which are are going to be thousands in the coming years. Play it right and you could parlay rapidly ageing skills in the old ways into a lucrative, high-demand role heralding in the new. Sounds pretty good to me?
In any technological sea change there are winners and losers. Winners sense the wind changing, adjust their sails, and charge bravely ahead. Losers linger adrift in denial, refusing to adapt until the maelstrom inevitably takes them. Hint: be a winner.
Lucrative government contracts? You are going to need a team of lobbyists and crony sales guys and millions of dollars to handle the overhead of businesses that deal in government. Actual knowledge of the subject matter will be way down the list of requirements to earn lucrative government contracts.
On the other hand, going from horse-drawn to internal combustion is a clear improvement, which isn't as obvious as going internal combustion to electric
Most electric forklifts use lead acid batteries. These batteries are only warrantied for 1-2 years because they fail unpredictably after that time frame (hence why they get replaced on that time frame). They also take forever to charge and their performance and lifetime is highly dependent on temperature. Basically, they are a pain.
EV buses will not be using lead acid and will use longer life battery tech (e.g. Li-ion), so your reason #2 will not be as big of an issue.
A pain yes, but very easily recycled. The components of a lead acid battery are easily separated and each have a ready market to recycle them. Lithium ion batteries are complicated. No two models are identical. Many models change internally from year to year, change enough to frustrate recycling efforts. Their components are tightly layered and not readily separated mechanical. They may be better batteries but they are not necessarily better lifecycle components within a fleet of vehicles. That's why forklifts, golf carts, boats and cars are still being sold with lead acids.
They're still being sold with lead-acid batteries because they're cheap, and they're good enough for those applications. LiIon batteries are significantly more expensive, but if the application requires that performance (like EVs), then that's what you use. No one cares about having a golf cart with a 100-mile range.
Also it's one of the few chemistries that still operate at low temperatures. They're not so great for other vehicles due to weight, spills. A spill can turn your vehicle into a pile of rust.
It's at least a little political. After all politics is really mostly about allocating resources. All of your issues here are solvable with money. Most cities have the money to make that change, but due to politics choose not to.
I guarantee you when we really start feeling the effects of climate change and the politics on this turns, cities will be adopting electric bus fleets seemingly overnight.
Oh I absolutely agree. A lot of the foot dragging arguments I'm making are the same ones people made when busses started moving to compressed and liquid natural gas, and for what its worth I totally endorse getting at least started on electric fleets. "Ignore the problem" is not a good solution at all.
FYI, mining trucks and equipment are almost all electric. So are locomotives...even if that power comes from a diesel generator. One of the largest trucks in the WORLD is electric
In the German cities I lived in the fleets are very diverse (diesel, hybrids, purely electric). They must have worked something out, because I never once saw a broken bus in the last decade.
If the city has a cable bus fleet then more than half of the tooling and training is already done. You also have the substation personeel and need to retrain them for mainataining a charging substation instead of a supply substation.
In my country you also get at 10% discount if you turn in your used car battery when getting a replacement. They need to recycle a used battery for every new one sold.
The real reason to look at battery-electric buses is pure dollars and sense. Battery-electric buses can have lower lifecycle O&M costs. The current generation might not have lower O&M costs, but there is definitely a path to lower O&M costs with electric versus bus with internal combustion engines.
There's also an extremely valuable noise externality. If you live in a city (I do), you hear lots of buses roar like dragons, which is unpleasant, to say the least, for people outside the bus, and not that pleasant for people inside the bus. The other day I had one of those uncanny experiences when I was walking along, and there was a bus coming down the street, but I could tell something was "wrong." It took me a moment to realize that it wasn't making hideous engine noises because it was electric!
Little things may also improve bus uptake, like the lack of noise pollution.
I think we very much ignore the massive negative impact noise makes on our society. ICE vehicles create lots of noise that is massively disrupting our sleep in cities. Quieter cities should have a good increase in health as our citizens sleep more soundly.
I agree very much, and not only for the sleeping part.
My girlfriend suffer from hyperacusis. Loud ICE vehicles, especially two-wheeled one (there are a lot where we live) cause her physical pain. It's a relief when a vehicle starts and there is almost no noise.
We really wish the emissions and noise would go inside the rider lungs and ears. People would be much faster to make the switch to cleaner, less noisy vehicles.
I have a problem sometimes with late night "drag races" where two or more ICE vehicles decide that the relatively straight streets of a downtown grid are perfect for aggressively and loudly over-revving some engines then blasting down the street as loudly and presumably violently as possible.
Admittedly, my building is at the first traffic light of the straight part of the (one-way) Main St. Potential plans to restore two-way flow to such a street might lessen that somewhat, but I assume random idiots with what look like clear streets will continue to love showing off how loud their ICE engines get doing stupid stunts.
A least where I live, there is a ton of honking, too, usually for pretty trivial reasons, which is a bigger contribution of cars to noise pollution than their actual engines. I wish it cost $0.50 or something to honk a car horn.
For me it's the constant construction around here. Workers seem to start at dawn. Some days it will be a jackhammer, on more benevolent days you only hear general noise and the reverse beeps from some massive construction vehicle.
In today's world, a diesel bus is able to run for an entire day, doing route(s) back and forth without going back to the depot for refueling and charging. This can be true for an electric bus, but in general the range is not longer, and depends on stuff like
- elevation changes in the route
- climate; not only do batteries perform worse in cold weather, but heating and cooling makes up a significant amount of energy draw. In an ICE bus usually the ICE itself generates waste heat.
> Similarly, the Minnesota source claimed that over the three-week trial, electricity consumption was 70 percent heating and only 30 percent motion.
> Wright said (as of early fall) that Moscow’s trial routes for BEBs—trolleybus Routes 73, 76, 80, and 83—have had to use more buses just to run the same service, pointing to before and after slides. The four routes appear to have gone from 46 trolleybuses to 82 BEBs without any increase in service frequency, presumably because BEBs have considerable down time for midday charging.
That incurs a lot of additional costs:
- buses not in service while driving to and from charging points are personnel and vehicle hours that cost money, especially if after charging you need to be able to place the driver in a bus actually going into service
- you are maintaining and storing a much larger fleet of buses now
Until an electric bus can be made that can run a full day without charging, costs will rise for electric bus adopters.
You can charge the busses at the endstation with a inverted "train roof thing" for 5 min/45 min drive.
Heating should not really be a problem. You should use some open flame heater with e.g. gas, wood spill etc for that not high quality electricity or gasoline.
Ye, maybe I should have written enclosed open flame. I meant some sort of protected open flame heating a tube of water. Is burner the correct term?
Having a auxiliary diesel burner with water as medium is standard practice in the area. The buses have so large windows that the heating power is quite ridiculous. Maybe EV-buses need smaller windows? I tried to figure out how the buses and the article are heated and another article states electricity and oil burner when it's quite cold. (https://www.jamtkraft.se/om-jamtkraft/nyhetsrum/stadsbussar-...)
I don't think it's reasonable to heat them only with electricity in that climate. Maybe a wood pellet burner could be used if one is made for automotive use? I wonder if the pellets would bounce around too much ... probably only good enough in rural areas where there would be no smog problems.
Biomass or biofuel being renewable or good for the environment is debatable at best, especially when considering unintended consequences (like Brazilian rainforests getting slashed for biofuel crops).
Obvoiusly the best is to not use the energy in the first place, but what renewable ("regrowable") would be better than biomass if heat is what you want?
It's the end stops that have the roof charger. Traffic lights would probably be too short of a stop? Unless you have plenty of them on the route so you could afford some green lights without running out of battery.
> climate; not only do batteries perform worse in cold weather, but heating and cooling makes up a significant amount of energy draw. In an ICE bus usually the ICE itself generates waste heat.
New Flyer, a major bus maker, is based out of Winnipeg, Canada, and is developing e-buses:
Pure second-hand anecdote, but my father is in management at our local regional transportation company (covers buses, lightrail, and more). We're not a small city.
They're experimenting with an electric bus right now - but so far it's been a nightmare. Range is the primary problem, lasting less than a full route, sometimes not even lasting over an hour after a full charge. This has resulted in having to tow the bus back to the shop several times.
Even with removable batteries, you'd have to have a lot of these lying around, and a lot more buses running shorter routes, to compensate. Their CNG buses just don't have this problem, and produce largely water vapor as their combustion bi-product.
Which vendor is supplying those buses? Sounds like your unit may be malfunctioning if that's nowhere near spec, or you have extreme weather conditions.
The vendor is GreenPower Motor Co. Inc.'s EV Star mini-buses. They bought 6 of them for testing.
I think the problem is the terrain, distance in the routes, and expected load.
"Out of the box" it looks like they're capable of 100-150 miles, but from what he said, they weren't getting those numbers even on a good day.
From that experience, and from his attitude towards them. I doubt they'll be eager to try out the full sized versions.
The CNG buses they currently run are pretty darn clean, and cheap to operate as it is. So electric will have to be quite a bit better in order to convince them to switch.
I don't have insight to the testing process, but ya, I assume they drove one around before buying 6 of them...
It's like the difference between using the trial period for some new SaaS product, vs. actually buying it and putting it into limited production - you'll find all sorts of things you didn't run into before.
You must also consider the scale they operate at - buying 6 for testing probably isn't too big of a deal if they don't work out long term.
Almost all EV and electric mobility range numbers are pure bulls*it. Scooters with 40 miles range? You'll get 15 miles at best. They measure those doing laps on tracks. I can't imagine how absurdly mindbogglingly braindead they must be to think doing laps around a track is anything representative of the real world. Do the company execs spend all their day in the office, and have never in their life ever seen a hill or traffic light before?
The thing is you want ranges to be reproducible for comparisons, and for that you need a standardized environment - temperature, humidity, air pressure, wind speed, driving profile. The easiest way to do this is on a track or on a rig.
Routes and service varies a lot from one fleet to another and route to another. That effects the type of bus you want. Maybe you have a school bus in San Diego. Drives flat and a couple of hours day. Or maybe it's bus in the Sierras and has to climb 2500 feet up a steep grade in 100 degree weather at 7000 feet.
The other thing I think is routes are currently designed around diesel buses. Natively replacing them with electric is likely to be sub optimal.
Yeah but when you then go and sell it to the customer as a "scooter with 40 mile range" this is extremely deceptive and disingenuous as you KNOW the customer isn't going to be running their scooter around a track, they probably are going to be using it to commute around town with stoplights and hills.
Yes, it depends on a lot of factors, but stoplights exist almost everywhere and should be considered standard; if that halves your range to 20 miles, you should probably advertise it as "10-20 miles range depending on terrain" instead of "40 miles".
A standardized environment for testing is fine but it should emulate some set of realistic conditions if you intend to use numbers from it for advertising, e.g. stop-and-go every 100 meters, uphill 2% for 1/3, 0% for 1/3, downhill -2% for 1/3, or something like that would at least be slightly more representative of the commutes of most people.
It is interesting to me that we aren't seeing a larger uptick in utilities funding this kind of investment. The article does mention that in one of the pilots, it was indeed funded by the local utilities. My interest lies in why that isn't more wide spread. I can only imagine the massive amounts of revenue, if not also kick backs from various government subsidies, that a given utility would receive if EV buses see wide spread use.
That is not to say that there would not need to be investment in the utilities infrastructure, but it would pay out in spades over time. OTOH I can also see an argument to be made that the utilities may not want to see this happen everywhere, especially in highly populated areas and areas that see power supply issues in general.
Given the challenges with charging them with limited real estate in city centers, would it make more sense to install overhead wires, like a trolley bus, but retaining the ability to drive disconnected from the wires and constantly charge when in an area with the wires?
Like most thing, its an "it depends" situation. The tech exists, but isn't in wide usage. There's a higher upfront infra cost to pay back, and while short distance reroutes can be accommodated, you do set the general routing in stone. This works fine for larger, denser areas with routes that are more or less fixed.
King County metro (includes Seattle) is one of the agencies that's made major investments in trolley buses.
Battery only bus tech is also growing. I don't think it's viable for large scale usage yet, but KC Metro has been working on and piloting it seriously for a few years. It's possible that by the time more places would look into trolley buses during fleet replacement, battery ones will be ready.
Trolley buses are necessary on many Seattle routes because of all the hills, you just can’t beat torque on a good electric (same is true for many other hilly cities like SF, Vancouver, and Lausanne).
Metro and sound transit has also invested in a lot of hybrids. The most recent fleet is pretty interesting (they also have a few battery-only electrics, but these seem more like testing).
The buses in Lausanne when I lived there were on overhead electric when in the city center and switched back to diesel when they came off the wires. The same was true in a number of other Swiss cities. So I would hardly call it "not in wide use." Just not in the USA.
Ah, I think we're both right here, just on slightly different things. You're correct, trolley with diesel backup isn't new and is in fairly wide usage around the world. To the original comment:
"retaining the ability to drive disconnected from the wires and constantly charge when in an area with the wires"
Seemed to refer to trolley buses with rechargeable battery backups, which are much less common. Admittedly, I don't have non-US stats, just that there are only a handful of cities in the US that use them.
Which routes in Lausanne had that? I never noticed any dual use buses when I lived there. It isn’t surprising, Seattle used to have dual engine buses in the 80s/90s that were diesel until they went into the downtown bus tunnel. They got rid of that when they brought the train in, and I guess the buses were cleaner by then as well.
I lived there up to about eight years ago, and I recall most of the routes running through the center city were dual. I couldn't name route numbers at this remove, though.
Buses are pretty big and don't care too much about weight. Surely you can slap on a battery big enough to power the bus all day.
Since the bus is already parked somewhere during the day, couldn't you charge it then? From what I've seen there's usually a gigantic parking lot somewhere in the city where all the buses go to sleep. Would the parking lot need to be much larger to accommodate charging stations? I assume it's already got a diesel pump of some sort to feed the buses since you don't exactly see city buses at normal gas stations.
That setup (charging where the buses go at the end of the day) requires the buses have enough battery to go their entire day on one charge. But then, that restricts the ability to take a just-now-ending-service bus that's out on the road, and redeploy it to fill in for a bus that is running late, or a bus that has broken down.
(I have seen this happen: I have seen a VTA "Rapid" 522 bus, just about to go in-service at the start of its route, switch to "Not in Service" and leave without picking anyone up. When I called in to report the weirdness, the agent on the other end checked and told me that an Express bus nearby had broken down. That was the right call: The Raid bus was closer, and the Rapid schedule frequent enough to absorb the loss.)
So ideally, you would want charging points to be available where buses sit during the day. That is at least at one end of the route. It can be done, it just takes more infrastructure.
> I assume it's already got a diesel pump of some sort to feed the buses since you don't exactly see city buses at normal gas stations.
While I was an undergrad at Ohio State, I drove 35- and 40-foot buses for CABS (the campus bus service). We did indeed have a diesel tank and pump on-site. But occasionally it would break down. When that happened, we would indeed use a normal gas station! All of the nearby gas stations with diesel pumps were evaluated for bus access.
I wonder if you could get away with charging most of the buses by having overhead lines in heavy bus traffic areas to power and charge the buses during a portion of the route before having them return to full battery usage. This might also simplify overhead line deployment as there are some areas that are poorly suited for lines - line deployment could be focused on easy to service and deploy areas.
> Consequently, powering a full-size bus would require a battery pack that is unacceptably large and heavy, as well as too costly to make a battery-electric bus commercially competitive.
Of course, the energy density of lithium may change things!
I can't speak for the relative costs but adding a bigger battery adds cost, it also adds weight which increases the motor size you need, further increasing costs, it also increases wear and tear on the road.
Also the article mentioned $1.5million for infrastructure to charge 20 buses. Ideally you'd want that running 24/7, not lying dormant for 16 hours a day.
And lastly, you're adding a massive single point of failure. What if the power goes out overnight? Suddenly you don't have any buses the next day.
Ps I like the idea of buses going to sleep at night :)
Well its like the tyranny of the rocket equation. Yes the size increase isnt linear, but it isn't a free lunch either.
Don't forget, once you've added an extra tonne of batteries your suspension and chassis need upgrading (ie get heavier) to compensate, so you need to add more batteries to compensate....
One issue that the article highlighted was that if you do that you might need a significant grid upgrade to handle a large number of buses charging simultaneously. If the charging stations are spread out over the city the grid probably doesn't need to be upgraded.
Seattle actually does this. You have some hybrid routes as well where buses will operate off of diesel for part of their route, then hook up to the overhead wires before going through tunnels downtown. Some routes outside the underground downtown core also run wires.
OTOH, a few charging spots might be cheaper/more flexible if you've got a wide variety of routes.
Trolley bus wiring is infrastructure that has an ongoing maintenance cost that many places probably don't want to pay for. (In addition to the initial CapEx.)
I think that series hybrid buses would be better: battery runs e-motor, and have a range extender (generator) that kicks in when needed.
In some cases, but not in general. The problem with wires is you have to put them up. While this seems obvious, it needs to be thought about carefully. You need to plan your route and be right about the path it takes (even a minor change is at great cost). It is possible to create a route from Point A to Point B and have nobody ride it. It is possible that the route that is popular today will go out of style.
With a self powered bus (any technology) running on standard streets you can have it go anywhere. If the route you choose is wrong most of the costs were the bus so you can start a different route in a different area until you get people riding. If there is a popular event one weekend you can shift buses to serve that event for just that weekend. If the needs change you shift routes to match instead of sticking with routes that no longer make sense.
Don't get me wrong, advantages of fixed wires and rails (note the and!) make it worthwhile to put in a trolley system on your busiest routes. However the advantage of a bus that can go anywhere means that in general no you can't/shouldn't.
No, you bring back all the disadvantages I list - perhaps on a smaller scale but they still exist. You are still forcing all your buses to put part of their time on a pre-defined route. Maybe you can say we will always use this central station and put wires for a few blocks around it - but after that your buses should be spreading out in different directions. This isn't enough to get a significant charge.
It is an idea that seems sound, but fails because of reality.
This is exactly what they do in Shanghai and it works. The rails are not for the whole route just long stretches with lots of lights.
As far as I can tell they have a mixed fleet. Electric for ones that are downtown enough to charge and natural gas for busses that are mainly outside the city.
Things change rapidly so this may no longer be true.
Well they actually do this in Seattle and it seems to work out. A fixed route is also not a bad thing (see bus rapid transit) and can encourage private development.
See the last paragraph in my original. Fixed routes to have advantages, but only when/where you are sure they are very busy and will be for a long time. Most routes are not that sure in the modern world, so the flexibility advantages of non-fixed routes is important.
Of course part of the advantage of flexible routes is we assume car infrastructure is in place. While that isn't entirely desirable, it is reality: anyone fighting it directly is ignoring reality. Better to fight it indirectly which means making public transit better and better until people decide on their own to get rid of their car - only when few people use a car regularly can getting rid of roads be realistic.
You can't ever really get rid of the roads, you can only downsize them. Even if everyone uses public transit, you need some way of transporting goods and cargo, and the only way currently of doing that within a municipality or to most final destinations is by truck. Whether you're moving a shipping container full of stuff to a retail store from the train terminal, or you're packing up someone's home and moving their furniture to a new apartment, it always goes by truck, and trucks need roads.
But if we could get rid of cars, we could make the roads a lot narrower.
buses have fixed routes, known depots, and in many cases, share larger stations as destinations for transit to other buses or other forms of transpiration. all are suitable for charging buses.
Did you read the article? One of the big issues that some cities are facing is finding real-estate for installing charging stations of sufficient capacity. It specifically cites Philadelphia as having run into this problem.
This doesn't stop them from copying what China does.
China has the same problem in Shanghai. The solution they use is overhead wires to charge busses while they are driving for parts of downtown that busses can connect to and disconnect from at will.
Yes, this seems like the ideal solution. A bus is big enough to where you can easily engineer a quick attach/detach "cartridge". Since it's all operated by the city (or private entity), you also don't have the issue you would with consumers where you need to worry about users turning in damaged batteries for good ones.
The battery will still be ridiculously heavy and very large, well outside the limits of human ability to move it. So you need some sort of machinery to do it, as well as a human operator.
Also, keep in mind you don't just need very robust electrical quick-connects, you also need fluid quick-connects for the heating/cooling. As well as a system to bleed air from the loops inside the bus.
Let's say the bus needs 50 miles of range, and it runs at 2 kWH per mile, so it needs a 100 kWH battery. Assuming 200Wh/kg density, the battery will be at minimum 500kg.
Seems like misguided faux environmentalism, like banning plastic straws but keeping the longtail of plastic waste. Electric buses are good, of course, but a well-designed and highly utilized bus network, even with the dirtiest diesel engines, is going to get you serious wins over GHG/CO2/VOC emissions from automobiles if you can replace those trips.
Certainly we don't want to make perfect the enemy of the good: given a fixed budget we're probably better off buying 2 diesel buses rather than a single electric bus.
But don't forget particulate emissions: I believe that's the primary motivation for electric bus conversion. Buses are a significant portion of particulates in many cities, and particulates kill people.
given a fixed budget we're probably better off buying 2 diesel buses rather than a single electric bus.
I think the situation is a little more complicated than that. Electricity is a much cheaper fuel than diesel, and maintenance costs are lower for electric vehicles too, so in the long term electric buses may end up saving more money than they cost.
Add to that the fact that interest rates are very low right now, and it may even turn out that financing the electric buses and charging systems could allow cities to save money from day one, though I haven't crunched any numbers so this is admittedly just speculation on my part.
> maintenance costs are lower for electric vehicles
I think there is a <citation needed> here. Do ICE drivetrains really constitute a large fraction of the maintenance costs on cars and buses? In my experience, suspension and steering, and auxiliaries, are the things that break.
My anecdotal evidence of ~90k miles on our EV says yes. A coolant flush, tires and windshield wiper fluid are the only things I've done in that time.
Compare that with Brakes, Oil changes, Transmission service, DPF + DEF and the host of other things you get with a diesel engine + transmission.
We've got a diesel truck, diesel tractor and EV, it's pretty easy to see the maintenance differences between the three of them over the years(the tractor being the highest with the added complexity of a hydraulic system).
The EV gets to just run everything backwards when you step on the brakes. This won't stop you, but it'll make a huge difference to the remaining force needed to stop you, so it massively reduces wear on brakes and (which is why they did it) increases the effective range of the vehicle. And since they aren't worn out, the brakes need maintenance far less often. Driven gently the brakes on a EV might last its useful lifetime.
You can't do this with ICE, if you put diesel fumes in a compression chamber and pump the cylinders up and down, it doesn't turn back into diesel fuel, combustion isn't symmetric, so you need to actually have brakes.
Electric vehicles and hybrids use regenerative braking from the motor for a lot of their stopping power. They do still need brake work but significantly less often (100-200K mile interval vs ~50K though there is considerable variance depending on driving habits) because the friction brakes are engaged less often and so wear down more slowly.
Electric braking, useful 90% of the time to slow down. Hydraulic brakes only get used for a full stop. It's like engine braking on steroids and fully integrated into your brake pedal so that you don't need to know which brake system operates at a given time.
I doubt it's due to the EV's regenerative braking; if anything, that's a more complex system with more things that can go wrong.
The answer is probably easier: a Prius is 3300 lbs and a Dodge Ram is 6600 lbs and carries much, much more if working. Those truck brakes are going to be thrashed much harder.
The regenerative braking system is not complicated at all. In fact, it comes basically for free!
All that happens is you cut power to the motor but leave the wheels attached to the motor. This is the same as "engine braking" on a manual. The wheels turn the motor, which steals kinetic energy from the car and charges the battery.
There's no extra bits or anything. It's all in the drivetrain that's there already.
Did you not pay attention in high school? When you step on the gas your car, you are converting electrical energy into kinetic energy. When you release your foot, the kinetic energy that is stored into the car moves tires, which moves the shaft of the electric motor. What happens if you manually rotate a conductor inside a magnetic field? Obviously induction happens, which converts the kinetic energy back into electricity and heat.
>more things that can go wrong.
Eddy Current Brakes are a passive system with an extremely high safety track record. If you ignore the bearing that holds the wheel/motor in place there are no moving mechanical parts. I couldn't think of a safer way to stop moving objects.
It's not complex at all and it's a consequence of electric motor operation. The engine goes into generator mode if you turn the supply into a load, which is very easily done and can also be easily done gradually. Regenerative braking uses this generated power to recharge the batteries, but you can essentialy do anything with it, the easiest thing being converting it into heat using a resistor.
Certainly suspension, steering and auxiliaries are the things that break, but every year (or 15,000km, or whatever your manufacturer recommends) you need to replace the engine oil and filter. Less frequently you need transmission fluids, coolant, air intake filter, brake pads and other consumables. On diesels you also need to refill the emissions compensation tank (the one VW cheated with), replace particulate filters. Heavily used vehicles need these replaced more often.
Electric motors will need their bearings replacing eventually, but they have no transmission fluids, no circulating oil picking up combustion products, and regenerative braking removes a huge amount of wear on brake pads.
I have a plug-in hybrid (EV infrastructure isn't great where I live) and after 2500km the brakes still stick like new. They've barely been used.
Particulates are one reason most city buses in the United States now run on natural gas. That's a real improvement over diesel in terms of particulates.
One big question I have is why LPG isn't a bigger thing for cars. Regular gas and diesel engines can be (relatively) cheaply modified to run on LPG and indeed can often run on both. It's a cleaner burning fuel than both gasoline and diesel AND is cheaper to boot.
A friend had a LPG conversion for a car, the tank took up a lot of luggage space. A larger tank for the same range doesn't matter as much for a large vehicle like a bus.
I think it's because most people don't understand the benefits of LPG fuel, and LPG vehicles incur costs similar to other alt-fuel vehicles without enjoying benefits.
Honda used to sell a natural gas civic and you could buy a home fill station, in the late 2000s it probably made a lot sense. But now, you'd be better off getting an electric vehicle and a home charger.
I think LPG is interesting, but if you're going to deal with speciality fuel/fueling, you can just get a hydrogen or battery electric vehicle and enjoy the benefits of an electrified powertrain. LPG powertrains retain the complexity and service costs of gas powertrains with pretty marginal benefits. Electrification has its own costs but unique advantages.
> LPG vehicles incur costs similar to other alt-fuel vehicles without enjoying
Not universally true. In Italy, where regular gas prices are stellar, LPG is a relatively common thing. Not common enough, but the infrastructure is "there" (although not as capillary as regular gas) and it's advertised as a consumer option.
In the case of New Zealand from the mid-70's to the early 80's, CNG (compressed natural gas) was subsidised by the government and there was a very large uptake. My dad had it installed in his Toyota Hiace van and Ford Falcons. This was during the oil shortages era.
When oil became cheap again, the government stopped the subsidies and it was back to petrol. The tanks and the pumps at the services stations were ripped out and sold to the Indians, Eastern Europeans and the Chinese.
At least newer diesels are a lot better about particulates than the older ones, the EPA has mandated particulate filters since 2007 and they reduce them by ~85-95%.
The crazy thing about the VW scandal: their cars still met the legal requirements for maximum allowed emissions even without the cheat module (at least here in the USA)!
How would they possibly rig the numbers on a particulate filter? The cheating was achieved through engine control software selectively disabling parts of the emissions control system when it detected testing was not occurring. You cannot use software to selectively disable a particulate filter bolted onto the exhaust pipe.
My city has upgraded to hybrid and NG buses in the last decade (in addition to some non battery very old and new trolley electrics), there are plenty of solutions in between dirty diesel and clean electric that have to be considered as well.
It's neither misguided nor faux environmentalism. As a cyclist, going behind buses is straight toxic. Maybe you're a car user and you don't mind the dirtiest diesel engines, but those particles poison the lungs of our citizens and that nasty emission discourages people from using buses and cleaner transportation modes.
We must move to electrification if we want to save our lungs and our planet. No amount of dirtiest diesel is going to save us.
> As a cyclist, going behind buses is straight toxic.
Maybe[1], but still less so than the equivalent emissions from the dozen or so passenger vehicles that bus replaced.
The upthread point (which is correct) is that the environmental gains from bus transportation are concentrated in the efficiency gains of shared vehicles and that the relative impact of the fuel used is fairly minor. Get people on buses, then optimize. The linked article is worrying about things in the wrong order.
[1] I mean, no, not really. Diesel exhaust stinks, it's not particularly "toxic".
>Diesel exhaust stinks, it's not particularly "toxic".
You might know your body well enough to be able to tell that it is not particularly toxic to you personally, but please consider the possibility others are more vulnerable it (because for example their bodies have more chronic inflammation than yours does).
The URL below goes to an article not about diesel exhaust or pollution, but about chronic inflammation, entitled "Understanding inflammation". Here is all the advice near the end of the article on how a reader might reduce inflammation. Emphasis mine.
>“Losing weight can have profound effects on lowering inflammation,” says Brown, who adds that eating a diet rich in fruits and vegetables and low in fats, processed foods, and sugars is generally a good idea, though more study needs to be done to determine how it might affect inflammation. Exercising, which causes an acute inflammatory response in the short term, but an anti-inflammatory one when we regularly get moving, is another strong step to take, he adds. Other researchers advise getting plenty of sleep, lowering stress levels, and seeking out treatment for inflammation-inducing culprits, such as gum disease and high cholesterol levels. Avoid contact with heavy metals such as mercury, which is found in dangerous amounts in some large fish, and limit exposure to substances, such as diesel exhaust and cigarette smoke, that can set off the immune system.
I don't know what the argument here is. Obviously you don't want to be sucking down diesel exhaust, and I don't believe I set a stake down on "diesel is good for you".
My point was that, on balance, riding in a bike behind a diesel bus is less toxic than riding behind the train of 10+ cars it replaced (or really that riding in a city filled with single passenger vehicles is less healthy than one inhabited by diesel bus riders.
Get folks out of their cars. Then worry about what kind of buses they ride.
You seem fixated on cars emitting stuff. Riding behind any vehicle that burns and releases any fossil fuel sucks, and all those vehicles should be replaced. In fact cars are quite a bit ahead of busses.
My argument is that maybe not for you, but for many people the exhaust from one diesel bus is worse than the exhaust from 10 or 20 gasoline / petrol cars. The article I linked to makes no mention of any kind of pollution except for diesel exhaust.
(In California, where I live, the vast majority of cars are gasoline / petrol cars.)
It's not toxic in an acute sense, but it's equivalent to cigarette smoke and chronically terrible for you (I love smoking and diesel, btw). Both are low T impartially combusted complex hydrocarbons that generate a stew of different nanoparticles and reactive species.
It's terrible stuff!
You can argue that it's benign in the middle of nowhere, where the concentration drops to nothing quickly. But not in the city!
So add solar+wind into your jurisdiction's power mix. It's not hard to do, and progressively the diversity of power will be more stable than just relying on the coal plant which will get shut down.
EV buses allow you to wean off carbon power sources in many stages.
I don't mean to suggest that power generation modernization isn't important but... it's pretty beside the point, investing in diesel buses is locking that usage in for a great many years while an electric bus may be eventually powered by coal initially then transitioned over to an alternative energy source.
I’d argue for diesel buses because wind and solar already strain keeping the electric grid stable, except it won’t be a coal plant, it will be a natgas plant, which by itself is a huge win over diesel motors in a big city.
Centralized coal power plant outside of the densely populated areas that buses concentrate in >>>>> mobile pollution machines in those same dense areas.
Volume of coal power plant >>>> mobile pollution machines.
The 7 out of the top 10 CO2 emission sources in Europe are coal power plants. Their production is blown by the wind to populated areas. Some of coal power plant production ends up different countries as well.
>Electric buses are good, of course, but a well-designed and highly utilized bus network, even with the dirtiest diesel engines, is going to get you serious wins over GHG/CO2/VOC emissions from automobiles if you can replace those trips.
The long-term plan is to electrify both the buses and the cars, and also the trucks, and to do that in a reasonable amount of time, you need to work from now on at all of them at once.
What's your long-term plan?
And by the way, most of these cities already have a big diesel network. But let me ask again, what is your long-term plan?
"even with the dirtiest diesel engines, is going to get you serious wins over GHG/CO2/VOC emissions from automobiles"
Not for particulates. Even a clean diesel bus is going to be dirtier in particulates vs. gasoline. Its the nature of the fuel (i.e. not the thermo cycle used).
ON the other hand, converting to CNG eliminates particulates completely (you use the same engine, just feed it CH4)
That "well-designed and highly utilized bus network" is the hard part. I've never seen it.
Around here the buses run pretty empty. Sometimes they are literally empty. They take longer routes than cars, with each passenger going a longer distance because the bus route is not what they really want. It would be far better if the passengers had cars.
You’ve never seen it because you live in a city with garbage transit.
(It would not be better if all the passengers had cars, because then it would lead to greater congestion and it would take everyone 2 hours to go 10 miles.)
Bus routes are already subject to pretty sophisticated optimization. You can push utility around to do different segments of the community depending on your political priorities, but there aren't global optimizations just sitting on the table. Unless your transit agency is really incompetent, in which case you have to ask why your call to "improve the bus system" today will fare differently from all those that came before.
If that were possible, it should have already happened.
The bus just isn't going to take people point-to-point. It will go to a hub, and then people will change buses, and then another bus will go out. Point-to-point service is personal transportation. Shared transportation fundamentally can't be optimized to individual needs.
So the buses drive longer distances, and they have to drive even when empty.
BTW, bus usage can seem better than it really is. You are likely to go on the popular parts of the routes, so you see the buses being fuller than they usually are.
Are current US bus sizes right-sized? Perhaps we need smaller buses on more interesting routes. Really large buses with mega-batteries (possibly literally megawatt sized) seems impractical compared to natural gas. However, 10 passenger shuttles, and more of them, might be practical. If the operating costs can be lower with electric, then that should free up budget to hire more drivers to drive more routes to drive better utilization, etc.
Megawatt(-hour) isn't impractical. It shouldn't be strange that a bus needs significantly more energy storage than a car that might use 100kWh.
And Megawatt peak power isn't much, either. A decent Tesla has half a megawatt peak power. A bus on hilly routes or for highway speeds could and maybe should have double that.
Charging infrastructure needs to be done right, though. To make >1 Megawatt charging work well takes some careful thought. But it's not ultimately harder than a few fast DC chargers ganged together (probably need battery backing to make the peak charging cost lower, but ultimately, if you have lots of buses charging a lot, it's not super surprising if you need a good grid connection... but that's half of why you pay for electricity, so that's ultimately not a problem, either). That's actually a valid option.
Self-driving buses might be great, but there's no point in waiting for them to be invented when there are such large gains to be made today from better and more frequent bus service, and increased efficiency/reduced pollution (from both ICE and electric buses).
I completely agree. Instead of adding to the ever-expanding pavement, we could use that money smarter for free or greatly reduced public transit, and tons of it.
The cities are less dense, and the population boomed (and moved to the suburbs several miles away) in a time where the economy was good and car ownership was cheap.
And we're paying for it now, because they're too sparse for the tax base to support urban services and too dense to have self sufficient services like deeply rural areas.
They are facing problems though with the range etc. So be interesting to see the long term result of this project and I'm hoping for the best. This area desperately needs better public transportation.
The reasons electric buses arent seen more often are many, and they arent political at all.
- Tooling. Fleets generally maintain all the tooling necessary for specific make model and design of a vehicle. if that fleet gets large enough, they get a seat at the manufacturers table to help steer development and ensure a sustainable product that doesnt increase rider cost or decrease economy/comfort. Battery fleets would mean having to outfit shops with new training for high voltage, arc/flash suits, hot-sticks and other tools. Youre likely going to need to hire a few electricians to train and oversee people as well.
- lifecycle maintenance. As a fleet mechanic I know down to the day, minute, and hour when my motors are clapped out and when everything needs to be replaced. Diesel engines can run for several million miles if well maintained, but the lifecycle on a fleet electric vehicle is quite a bit more limited. A Cushman or Toyota fork lift for example is often entirely electric and sees a similar duty cycle (high tork, long service, low speed.) Replacement batteries are provided from a third party every year or two. Fleet operators in most US cities havent the slightest idea what the real-world operations lifecycle is for an electric bus. Its likely going to be pretty poor if youre operating these busses in places like Wisconsin winters or Arizona summers.
- Again, Tooling. If you told me I was in charge of a fleet of electric buses id probably quit. Youre talking about 50-60 busses for a small city, so youll need a set of substations dedicated for high speed charging. youll need your own PPD (Physical Plant maintenance) to handle generators during power outages, cooling during summer, and general repair. Your existing diesel fleet just requires a fuel dump and an apprentice mechanic. Youre also going to need to understand how to dispose of something that can, if punctured, explode into flames. Most oil recyclers in fleet operations pay you for the oil you give them and grant a discount on the new stuff. Ive never seen a fleet battery contractor for forklifts that has ever done more than pickup, drop off, and fees.