Electric School Buses More Than Doubled In USA From March 2022 To June 2023
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European here, I like reading about improvements of public transport in the US, I wish you guys all the best.
Me, too. I know from the outside it feels like America doesn't make progress. But on a local level, many cities and counties are making strides. I know the areas near me are trying to be cost efficient with public transport, but I also live close to DC. It's kinda the thing here.
True. It's really does look like the US makes no effort at all from the outside. But the truth is that half of the country, the red states, really is not doing much at all. Any progress is mostly made in blue states. It's like two countries stuck together. And they are wildly different.
From 5 to 10!
Kidding aside, I love this, but would love exponential growth more. School buses have mostly pre-defined routes and always stop at home base overnight. They're an ideal candidate.
Technically 5 to 10! would be factorial growth. If that trend continues, we would quickly run out of space on planet Earth to hold all those busses 😉
Oh you!
Oh wow, I haven’t seen one of these in the wild in like 10 years
https://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/extrapolating.png
Well, 10! is probably enough busses to chauffeur every American to where they need to go, with a bit of coordination. So, I feel like they'd slow down at some point.
Unless this is like the trend where everyone needs to own a truck for a car, but now school buses. Then they might still go for 12!
School buses and delivery vehicles for sure.
I cringe every time the UPS truck comes through. The driver stops and shuts off the engine, makes their delivery, starts it back up, slams the accelerator, drives 100 ft., slams the brakes and then does it all over again. Day in and day out.
Also lawn equipment. I'm amazed that people still run these smoke spewing, oil leaking, horribly inefficient little devices all around their own property.
I’ve found the battery powered yard tools fantastic, but I live in an urban area with small yard. I don’t know whether you’d have as good an experience with a large yard or as a service
I've tried out both a battery-powered weed wacker and a battery powered lawnmower and had to get rid of both. As much as I wanted them to succeed, they were both just seriously under-powered and needed multiple batteries to complete the job.
Probably will take another look at them when my current gas models need to be replaced maybe in 5+ years, hopefully they've gotten better.
Idk, cases like these seem like a waste of lithium. Why not make it a trolleybus? You'd need much smaller batteries, they wouldn't care much about low temps and charge time would be irrelevant. Seems like such an underrated tech.
Love to see it. All these large vehicles that stop and go in urban areas are prime candidates for electrification. Hope to see (at least) one in person around here in the next few years!
I wish there was more transparency on the maintenance side of things to compare running costs for EV vs ICE. The running costs and wear on the EVs will probably be significantly reduced enough to cause pause for further ICE investment on the local level.
Agree. I imagine that as these fleets grow you’ll see more of those figures. In my experience, the 10k service on my EV was just a tire rotation. $20. I certainly spent more than that in oil changes alone with my ICE in the first 10k miles. I imagine it will be the same for buses.
The downside is the significantly higher up front cost, but you make up for it in reduced fuel and maintenance costs, as well as a longer service life.
school buses look like they are literally the best kind of vehicle to be electric.
premade path, with very clear requirements for range, for a few hours a day then back to the charger.
Also mail trucks, especially in (sub)urban areas. Those things really don't put on that many miles each day, and the type of driving they do gives them terrible mileage that would be much more efficient on the electric paradigm.
Sadly, the Grumman LLVs are set to be replaced by stock vans.
If I remember correctly, the first USPS fleet replacement option was laughable in its EV percentage, but I believe that has since changed to a significantly higher percentage.
https://about.usps.com/newsroom/national-releases/2022/1220-usps-intends-to-deploy-over-66000-electric-vehicles-by-2028.htm
This USPS announcement says 75% will be electric, and they’ll only be buying electric after 2026.
I was going to say this. They're Ideal. You can slow-charge 16 hours a day, idle them for 4 and discharge for four.
A city bus has to do the opposite, which is why there are a lot of municipalities moving towards on-wire trolley charging, where corridors are powered with an overhead catenary system, but branches are run off-wire.
My daughters school (in Canada) uses several. They’re not only quiet, but they’re not spewing gas/diesel fumes where kids are standing around when loading, especially in the winter. They’re not at 100% electrification yet, but they appear to have around 50% of the busses as EVs.
Nice for the local residents too, as they’re much quieter running and up down the residential streets around the school.
I was walking around one morning and heard that unsettling futuristic electric car noise.
To my surprise, it was an electric school bus! It looked like every other school bus, but the bottom was blue. I saw it take off too, it seemed like it had a lot of giddy up to it.
Back when I still took the bus to school, all the buses where and still are electric. Great to see it being nationwide!
There's gonna be a lot of resistance to this in red states.