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'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.
I can't imagine the batteries can last all day, do they have swappable battery packs?
Buses and other large vehicles use most of their fuel accelerating. Electric buses and freight trucks actually can coast for a hell of a long time on barely any fuel, but have to stop and then accelerate frequently. Regenerative braking diminishes this cost, extending service life on a battery charge.
Buses are complex and require motor and drive train maintenance. Drive trains in electric vehicles are vastly-simpler--no gearbox--and hub motors provide an option amounting to wiring and an electrical control box. Far less maintenance, far less wear, longer service lives.
It would make sense to swap out entire buses rather than batteries. Bus drivers need a food break every 4-5 hours; rotating them back to the depot and putting them back on power would allow substantial recharging. Some of these buses can recharge 100% in under an hour; and for buses going into service to meet peak demand, you'll end up with them coming in and out at different times during the day, allowing you to keep a turn-over reserve: a bus comes in, plugs into charging, and an hour later the driver takes a bus that hasn't gone out yet; two hours later, the guy who came in for lunch break when that new bus departed takes the bus he left behind, which has had two hours to charge. This reserve fleet also allows deployment of a new bus if one suffers mechanical breakdown, which is generally standard; meanwhile the amount of miles driven in total is spread among more buses, giving them a larger service life.
The logistics aren't that ridiculous.
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Yeah. I get it. You're being foolish and shortsighted.
Renewable energy is the way of the near future. But that is no reason to oppose the Keystone Pipeline. We need carbon based fuel in the now. Let's produce it here. Make jobs here. Don't send money to the Saudi religious nuts. And use the tax revenue from said production to fund alternative solutions.
Re immigration? When do you say no? When we have a 500 million people (in 30 yrs) or 1 billion people (in 70 years)?
Who gets to decide? The people living here? Or do they have no say?
It's foolishness to say that the people here have no say.
If you're scared of your govt then you need to further restrict its powers
Vote 3rd Party in 2016 and beyond
If you look at where sales are, China is the biggest manufacturer and user. China is also investing massively in renewables and reducing coal use (hit peak a few years back).
We are already seeing BYD cars in the UK, and busses are soon to follow. Our own manufacturers need to catch up fast.
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SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
I'm guessing.
You can't make guesses to "prove" your point.
You actually stated that the US has more "wide swaths of inhabited land" than Canada? Take a look at the population density of the two. US's is 10x higher than Canada's. (http://www.indexmundi.com/g/r.aspx?v=21000)
You do realize that both Canada and US were developed starting at around the same time period so would have similar city layouts and infrastructure? And don't say that Toronto is probably just too small of a city... it's larger than Los Angeles by population.
Maybe your point is valid for your smaller cities though, like Dallas.
Yeah, King County Metro buying a bunch of electric busses doesn't "indicate there's a shift", since Metro has been running a significant number of electric busses for decades. With hydro power rather plentiful and relatively cheap, using electric vehicles around here makes sense.
Sound Transit's Link light rail also runs on electricity, for that matter.
On a side note - I always find it mildly amusing (and simultaneously annoying) when my Metro driver has to get out of the bus and deal with a broken electrical connection. Those overhead wired tracks don't seem to be the most reliable system in the world... but I suspect it's just because it's decades old design. Link certainly doesn't have any issues like that.
#DeleteChrome
I caught a taxi from Schipol Airport one day, an all Tesla fleet. I asked them how they get around given the limited range of an electric car. The answer was easy: Taxis actually aren't rolling at high speed the entire day. They average between 300-600km / day. They have a company 3 company mandated breaks, one of them is 30min. They take that lunch break at the Amsterdam Zuid-Ost Supercharger. No one in the fleet has ever run out of power or had to take their vehicle off the road when it could have been serving customers.