Slashdot Mirror
'Electric Buses Now Cheaper Than Their Diesel or CNG Counterpart, Could Dominate the Market Within 10 Years' (electrek.co)
An anonymous reader shares a report: Transit vehicles today are mostly powered by gasoline, diesel, and CNG, while batteries only represent about 1 percent of the market. It is currently a small part of the industry, but it's also the fastest growing fuel source in the sector and it's starting to become highly competitive. Electric bus maker Proterra is ramping up production and currently claims to be cheaper than diesel and CNG. It leads CEO Ryan Popple to make a bold prediction that battery-powered buses will dominate the transit bus market within 10 years. More specifically, he says that the majority of new bus sales will be electric by 2025 and all new bus sales to transit agencies will be electric by 2030. Proterra has so far only delivered a few hundred all-electric buses, but they have been announcing several major deals lately, like 73 buses from King County's Metro Transit, that seem to indicate there's a shift in the transit industry.
As a local boy, King County (Seattle, WA) makes sense for this. The downtown bus routes have overhead wiring. The city already has a vast network of electric buses running, so adding battery operated buses to transition on/off the connected wired network makes sense. They're probably one of the easiest metros to make such a transition.
Of course electric busses are cheaper. So are electric taxis and other high mileage commercial vehicles. Busses are an even more obvious target for electrification because they are big enough to encompass large battery packs, follow predictable routes and timetables, tend to taxed heavily due to creating a lot of pollution, and cost a lot to start with so the extra for a battery pack is a lower proportion of the overall price.
China is really leading the way here, on track for near 100% EV bus sales by 2020.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
This AC is a flaming jerk, like most ACs are, but in this case he's not wrong on some points. The vast majority of people don't want to use public transportation. Aside from the various inconveniences of it, personal safety risks, personal health risks, etc, it's viewed as something that poor people use, and even poor people tend to want to maintain at least the appearance of not being poor. This is nothing new, either, humans have always been this way, and I see no reason that will ever change about humans, either; people want personal transportation. Has nothing to do with 'Americans' or any other nationality, has nothing to do with 'greed, avarice' or any of the other nonsense that this AC is spouting, it's just pure and simple human nature.
Public transportation will always have a place in civilization, but it will never replace personal transportation. Electric vehicles are not only more efficient and non-polluting in and of themselves, they're also lower maintenance and quieter; they are the future and we should embrace it. Concerns about where the energy comes from are temporary problems; re-introduction of nuclear power, in the form of redesigned, safer fission reactors, is also something we need to embrace, rather than succumbing to the 'nuclear boogieman' of the past. Continuing to research and develop energy storage systems will also help. So-called 'renewable' sources like solar and wind will supplement and tide us over until the new generation of reactors can be brought on-line. Meanwhile we'll continue to chase practical fusion power, and other more exotic sources of energy.