The secondary costs of running a diesel fleet are also huge! Diesel motors generate a substantial amount of fine particulate that is unhealthy for anybody, and particularly unhealthy for children.
Even if an electric fleet is the same cost, changing over would save tons of money and alleviate tons of suffering. It's the right thing to do for any ethical reason you can consider.
Unless, I suppose, you're intent on making the poor suffer. Diesel buses are very cost-effective at accomplishing that.
Even in terms of primary cost, diesel buses are expensive to maintain. My FIL was a mechanic for the local school district for 15 years, so I got a little insight into that aspect of the district. Our medium sized school district, 4 big high schools and all the feeder schools for them, employs around 6 full time mechanics plus their manager with all the equipment and the facility to work on the buses year round plus parts etc. It's not difficult to imagine that cost alone adds at least $1 million to our district's budget annually. In addition they have to have some percentage of extra buses because they are constantly rotating buses out for maintenance. They also have to have at least one extra bus and driver on standby every day because diesel buses breakdown regularly during a route and they have to go out with a second bus and pick up the kids and finish the route.
So if a district can outsource part of that maintenance cost, and electric buses prove to be lower maintenance and more reliable that their diesel counterparts, there are significant savings to be had for the school districts.
California's greatly surpasseed the misery of their old diesel fleets. In a bid to "reduce carbon emissions" (really: cut budgets in the way that screwed over parents as much as possible), they simply eliminated most school busses.
Then, the state government claimed this reduced carbon emissions, ignoring the externalities associated with doubling most parents' commutes for 18+ years.
> Diesel motors generate a substantial amount of fine particulate that is unhealthy for anybody, and particularly unhealthy for children.
This is one of the biggest issues with US' private healthcare system.
The U.S. government just doesn't feel that direct "cost" in the same way countries that have to pay to fix the health of their citizens do. This is why you see a lot of other countries put higher taxes on sugar, gasoline, diesel, etc. Because they see a direct correlation between the consumption of those things and them having to invest more in their national healthcare system out of their tax money.
Meanwhile, in the US, since it's the citizens that pay out of pocket, that money still goes into the economy, so it's kind of all the same to the government whether or not they get sick or not. They may notice some correlation in the long-term, but the negative effects of these things are not nearly as urgent to the government.
Apparently there's an important patent on lithium iron phosphate (LFP) batteries that expires next month (on April 27th). I'm hoping that changes the economics on batteries and that LFPs become cheap and abundant, and widely available from a variety of manufacturers that aren't located in China.
LFP seems like the obvious choice for large vehicles like buses unless there's some reason to really need to optimize for range. In schoolbuses especially, it would be good to use a kind of battery that's much less likely to catch on fire.
Yes, that's a great point. Even if you ignore the usual idle time between the morning and afternoon runs, I have to imagine a range of 150-200 miles would cover ~95% of use cases. The bus problem therefore should be much easier than the long haul truck problem. Plus, there's no trailer so you could run the battery pack the entire length of the bus.
LiFePo batteries are already getting produced in huge numbers in China and are very cheap even here in the west. Could the Chinese LiFePo products legally be imported if they were using patented tech? Or is it a specific variation of LiFePo that is patented, and could make the batteries better?
Because at 150-250$/kWh retail price it's going to be extremely hard for local manufacturers to compete in the market against established Chinese manufacturers that can already make state of the art, high quality batteries at insane volumes.
Is safety a criteria for school bus in USA? I thought it was only cost since the design is from the last century and many bus don’t even have seatbelts.
I'm curious how they perform in cold conditions. Where I grew up, a solid 50% of the school year was at or below freezing regularly. We really worked those bus heaters -- you know the type, under a few seats scattered around the bus. Curiously, it doesn't seem that buses use heat from the engine, like most ICE vehicles, for heat. Instead, I'm pretty sure they were just using power from the motor for electric heating elements with fans. Given that an electric bus could easily fit an enormous battery slab under the seating, I wonder if electric buses could be even better than ICE buses in cold conditions -- barring the obvious issues with battery efficiency in cold.
Busses as a Service from a venture-backed company in a ridiculously volatile market..
What happens if/when they run out of funding?
Having a business productivity app go out of business with an "amazing journey" post is irritating but there are 50 other apps that will take their place. Introducing "as a service" here where there are serious legal and even civil rights issues in play is radically different.
These services are already outsourced in many school districts, with the district doing nothing more than contracting out for certain service levels and writing a check. Presumably if it pencils out, those contractors will switch to electric without even needing to consult the board of education.
I'm glad your parents were in an economic situation where you could live walking distance from school in a neighborhood safe enough to do so. Only 9% of students in the US live within a reasonable walking distance.
I think car usage is likely to go up unless the crime in cities is dealt with. For that to happen we have to stop calling constructive peace keeping work "racist" though and that seems unlikely.
It looks like they're modernizing the whole student transportation process: apps for parents/drivers/school admins, dynamic routing, monitoring, and metrics. They claim 20% reduction in student commute times. That's a big quality of life improvement.
I think the job would be quite interesting: geo, real-time, mobile, web, embedded, physical infrastructure, optimization, diverse user base, and many human factors. They're well-funded so probably pay decently.
The office photos show a large open plan, which could be an acoustic hellscape, like Google SF Spear St. If the space has enough sound-absorbing panels and dividers and quiet floors then it could be ok. Can any of you comment on the work environment?
For those questioning the feasibility, 100% electric school buses are already on the road in Montreal. I see them frequently, and they seem to handle our crappy roads and winters fine.
Shorter routes and longer idle periods mean that school buses can be charged at lower intensities over longer periods of time than commercial vehicles that have to charge quickly to get back on the road
Hmm...buses that (per the article) cost 2x or 3x what diesel ones would. From a company that's raising a whole lotta $$$ from VC's. And (plausibly) school districts will get rid of their old diesel bus fleets when they switch over...
Is anyone else suspecting an "of course we'll loose money like crazy, until we hit 'em with the massive price increase" business model?
EDIT: Wow, huge response. 3 points to add:
- Yes, kids not breathing fumes is better...but that doesn't change the company's nor the school district's finances.
- No, I have no good data on whether the "vastly lower TCO will cover the higher up front cost..." theory is 100% correct, or utter BS.
- My one not-too-close data point: A friend worked for a metropolitan bus system ~2011. She said they were getting rid of their "~1.4 up-front cost" diesel-electric hybrid buses - because the real TCO was considerably worse than the older, straight-diesel buses.
In rural area, yellow busses need to travel for two hours morning and night. And for extra-curricular activities, like transportation to away games, drives can last five hours or more.
Personally I am very exited about it but we lack data that does allow us to do proper TCO comparison of ICE vs EV on the heavy duty side. Also how does V2G economics actually work if you are trying to optimize for the lowest charging rate (usually during night to avoid peak)? If you are in V2G mode after 6 pm i assume you would need to start charging at night during cheapest rates and assure that the bus is charged by 5 am. Wouldn't this require 1 to 1 charger to bus ratio as you might not have enough time to swap? Wouldn't then infrastructure costs(chargers that are build and concrete around it) skyrocket?
Any overnight charging solution almost surely needs a 1-to-1 ratio anyway, because you're probably not going to pay an expensive and unreliable human to plug and unplug buses overnight every night when a charger will last 10+ years. You're already paying the bus driver to park the bus and to drive it away in the morning. Add a minute of bus driver labor to plug it in and a minute to unplug it in the morning.
Nice thing about this application is the predictability of the routes. And compared to city buses the ratio of time driving per regen is larger. I assume drain and recharge puts wear on the batteries?
Great news. Buses and government vehicles are perfect for electric. They go back to dedicated parking lots perfect for charging.
We desperately need to force electric vehicles for the upcoming USPS replacements too.
The funding / reform bill passed, but as far as I can tell it does not mandate or address the fleet. DeJoy said he was replacing with gas. There was a proposed bill but I can't find any recent news on it.
Ridiculous to spend that much money on 100% custom built vehicles that are gas powered.
Due to the usage patterns of the bus fleet I wonder if they could be used for some vehicle to grid [1] power bank on weekends/during weekday downtime? It might shorten the lifetime of the batteries themselves but would be a nice additional revenue stream.
This topic triggers me a bit because along with rants about CRT, masking, book banning, etc one of the buried topics among the loonies who have berated and attacked our school boards was that they were against electric buses. This is despite good info at least in our district that making the move would yield considerable savings over the service life. So point being, if you are following what's happening in your school district and there's an active group of nutjobs, don't be surprised to see them lash out against this too. I truly about fell out of my chair in shock the first time I heard one of these fools go off on a rant about masks that culminated in a monolog about electric buses taking away our freedom.
Just as an interesting note, our school district has switched the entire fleet (around 150) to CNG. This has supposedly reduced opex substantially over diesel. Also a huge reduction in particulates. Probably not as clean as EV but an improvement . Our district owns all their vehicles, but I believe this is not common.
I still don't get that TCO for EV is higher than Diesel.
On the consumer side, let's look at Tesla Model Y vs. Lexus RX 350. I am using "premium" makes on both sides of this equations. If we want to go with a cheaper ICE then it should be compared with a cheaper EV. Idea being, there is a reasonable comparison where EV comes out ahead on TCO.
Cost / mile: $0.04 vs. $0.10
Difference in purchase cost: $55K (base model Lexus) vs $59K (base model). Include $7500 Fed Credit this comes to ~$56K (assuming a 35% marginal tax rate)
Average miles per year: 12K. So fuel savings of ~$720
Even assuming a very generous cost of capital even TCO over 2 years beats ICE. That's before maintenance costs (which seem to be lower for EV).
TCOs for individual consumers will be vastly different depending on the parameters of the situation, with particular impact driven by volume of miles driven annually.
Due to this, commercial fleets in my view have a much clearer picture here than personal vehicle decisions. This is also particularly driven by personal vehicle purchases being driven less by “TCO” in a strict sense but rather “what is my monthly payment”.
In what world is the maintenance cost for a fleet of EV busses going to be less than that of a diesel? There are two orders of magnitude more diesel mechanics than people qualified to work on EV drivetrains.
>I am using "premium" makes on both sides of this equations
I guess, but a "premium" Model Y doesn't have any features that a far lesser ICE doesn't have, with inferior build quality. That's kind of the point. A premium Honda, VW or Toyota SUV are better comparisons, and substantially cheaper. Of course, that makes the TCO much more competitive...
I guess you have shown that in the luxury segment the TCO comes out better for EVs. Many people are not buying $50k+ luxury vehicles. Care to run an estimate for something like what I was buying a year ago? I was in the market for a loaded 5 year old vehicle with 60-80k miles for $10-13k (Dodge Dart for example, also liked a few Ford Fusion options). There were options like this available, though I happened to stumble upon the apocryphal 13 year old 175k miles $1,000 Honda and went with that.
that's excellent for city busses that run all day with good frequency, but I would not say so for school busses, whose reason to exist is to collect students that live far away from the school for one specific commute only. Should the municipality really build out overhead powerlines for 20 miles of cornfields just for one passenger needing only 2 trips per day, possibly less if that student has after-school activities?
[+] [-] MengerSponge|4 years ago|reply
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC121970/
Even if an electric fleet is the same cost, changing over would save tons of money and alleviate tons of suffering. It's the right thing to do for any ethical reason you can consider.
Unless, I suppose, you're intent on making the poor suffer. Diesel buses are very cost-effective at accomplishing that.
[+] [-] fiftyfifty|4 years ago|reply
So if a district can outsource part of that maintenance cost, and electric buses prove to be lower maintenance and more reliable that their diesel counterparts, there are significant savings to be had for the school districts.
[+] [-] hedora|4 years ago|reply
Then, the state government claimed this reduced carbon emissions, ignoring the externalities associated with doubling most parents' commutes for 18+ years.
[+] [-] asdff|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mtgx|4 years ago|reply
This is one of the biggest issues with US' private healthcare system.
The U.S. government just doesn't feel that direct "cost" in the same way countries that have to pay to fix the health of their citizens do. This is why you see a lot of other countries put higher taxes on sugar, gasoline, diesel, etc. Because they see a direct correlation between the consumption of those things and them having to invest more in their national healthcare system out of their tax money.
Meanwhile, in the US, since it's the citizens that pay out of pocket, that money still goes into the economy, so it's kind of all the same to the government whether or not they get sick or not. They may notice some correlation in the long-term, but the negative effects of these things are not nearly as urgent to the government.
[+] [-] jjtheblunt|4 years ago|reply
It may be more complex: electricity generation is very dirty in some regions, such as where coal is burned.
Is it more dirty than diesel emissions? I have no idea, but old diesels were nasty.
[+] [-] elihu|4 years ago|reply
LFP seems like the obvious choice for large vehicles like buses unless there's some reason to really need to optimize for range. In schoolbuses especially, it would be good to use a kind of battery that's much less likely to catch on fire.
[+] [-] xxpor|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mardifoufs|4 years ago|reply
Because at 150-250$/kWh retail price it's going to be extremely hard for local manufacturers to compete in the market against established Chinese manufacturers that can already make state of the art, high quality batteries at insane volumes.
[+] [-] speedgoose|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dont__panic|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sremani|4 years ago|reply
https://www.dailymetalprice.com/metalpricecharts.php?c=li&u=...
The days of falling battery prices in dollar terms are over.
[+] [-] caseysoftware|4 years ago|reply
What happens if/when they run out of funding?
Having a business productivity app go out of business with an "amazing journey" post is irritating but there are 50 other apps that will take their place. Introducing "as a service" here where there are serious legal and even civil rights issues in play is radically different.
[+] [-] bobthepanda|4 years ago|reply
Vehicle depreciation is a massive headache.
[+] [-] ElevenLathe|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] anonymouse008|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] me_me_mu_mu|4 years ago|reply
I hope car usage goes down, especially a single person driving a big SUV. Walk, or bike, to where you need to go. Less cars, more safe.
[+] [-] mike_d|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] moltke|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mleonhard|4 years ago|reply
https://www.ridezum.com/corporate-hq-hiring.html
It looks like they're modernizing the whole student transportation process: apps for parents/drivers/school admins, dynamic routing, monitoring, and metrics. They claim 20% reduction in student commute times. That's a big quality of life improvement.
I think the job would be quite interesting: geo, real-time, mobile, web, embedded, physical infrastructure, optimization, diverse user base, and many human factors. They're well-funded so probably pay decently.
The office photos show a large open plan, which could be an acoustic hellscape, like Google SF Spear St. If the space has enough sound-absorbing panels and dividers and quiet floors then it could be ok. Can any of you comment on the work environment?
[+] [-] mostly_harmless|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tpmx|4 years ago|reply
Most relevant sentence in this article.
[+] [-] PaulHoule|4 years ago|reply
https://tcatbus.com/its-electric-on-the-ithaca-commons/
[+] [-] bell-cot|4 years ago|reply
Is anyone else suspecting an "of course we'll loose money like crazy, until we hit 'em with the massive price increase" business model?
EDIT: Wow, huge response. 3 points to add:
- Yes, kids not breathing fumes is better...but that doesn't change the company's nor the school district's finances.
- No, I have no good data on whether the "vastly lower TCO will cover the higher up front cost..." theory is 100% correct, or utter BS.
- My one not-too-close data point: A friend worked for a metropolitan bus system ~2011. She said they were getting rid of their "~1.4 up-front cost" diesel-electric hybrid buses - because the real TCO was considerably worse than the older, straight-diesel buses.
[+] [-] guerby|4 years ago|reply
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dKs3LytrICA
[+] [-] humanrebar|4 years ago|reply
In rural area, yellow busses need to travel for two hours morning and night. And for extra-curricular activities, like transportation to away games, drives can last five hours or more.
[+] [-] ilikeatari|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] JumpCrisscross|4 years ago|reply
These districts have transferred that risk to the provider. Which seems reasonable.
[+] [-] sokoloff|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] chillingeffect|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dillondoyle|4 years ago|reply
We desperately need to force electric vehicles for the upcoming USPS replacements too.
The funding / reform bill passed, but as far as I can tell it does not mandate or address the fleet. DeJoy said he was replacing with gas. There was a proposed bill but I can't find any recent news on it.
Ridiculous to spend that much money on 100% custom built vehicles that are gas powered.
[+] [-] colincooke|4 years ago|reply
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vehicle-to-grid
[+] [-] coward123|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tigeba|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sanp|4 years ago|reply
On the consumer side, let's look at Tesla Model Y vs. Lexus RX 350. I am using "premium" makes on both sides of this equations. If we want to go with a cheaper ICE then it should be compared with a cheaper EV. Idea being, there is a reasonable comparison where EV comes out ahead on TCO.
Cost / mile: $0.04 vs. $0.10 Difference in purchase cost: $55K (base model Lexus) vs $59K (base model). Include $7500 Fed Credit this comes to ~$56K (assuming a 35% marginal tax rate) Average miles per year: 12K. So fuel savings of ~$720 Even assuming a very generous cost of capital even TCO over 2 years beats ICE. That's before maintenance costs (which seem to be lower for EV).
[+] [-] clomond|4 years ago|reply
Due to this, commercial fleets in my view have a much clearer picture here than personal vehicle decisions. This is also particularly driven by personal vehicle purchases being driven less by “TCO” in a strict sense but rather “what is my monthly payment”.
[+] [-] xxpor|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nickysielicki|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] itsoktocry|4 years ago|reply
I guess, but a "premium" Model Y doesn't have any features that a far lesser ICE doesn't have, with inferior build quality. That's kind of the point. A premium Honda, VW or Toyota SUV are better comparisons, and substantially cheaper. Of course, that makes the TCO much more competitive...
[+] [-] gregshap|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] aaronax|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] akira2501|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] GrumpyNl|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jabroni_salad|4 years ago|reply