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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.
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
No, but they have a bus-sized chassis to hang batteries under.
A lot gets said, and total carbon output has been studied a lot. For example, http://www.ucsusa.org/publicat....
If you'd bothered to actually go to the Proterra website and read up on the topic, you'd not have posted your rant. Amongst other things, they can fast-charge in five to 15 minutes using an overhead fastcharger that can be located at bus-stops. Considering that bus drivers need breaks, and there are often
built-in delays at route-end to support the schedule, a 15 minute recharge for 300 mile range once or twice a day works quite well.
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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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.
Some buses run on batteries, but I've seen several systems now for buses that get power from overhead lines (similar to trains). The summary seems to be overlooking these vehicles.
While overhead wires are fine for trains, which have predictable, smooth, well-maintained paths to travel, they are less than optimal for buses.
We have these in Cambridge, MA. They are a hassle because it's a fairly common occurrence that the armature will pop off the overhead wire and the bus will grind to a halt until the driver can go around and use a pole to hook it back on, creating a huge traffic hazard in the meantime. It would be great if they had some battery backup and could limp along to a bus stop before having to be reconnected.
Also, during power failures, every bus stops. This is great when two buses happen to be passing in opposite directions, causing the entire road to be blocked.
Yeah, but thing is....it is still a BUS.
Doesn't matter what you do to the engine or externals of it...who wants to ride a public transportation bus around sitting next to some smelly bums?!?
In Toronto, Canada, about 2.75M people per day. The entire city basically shuts down if the TTC is not running, and there's major chaos if the subway has issues.
For some deranged reason you think only poor people who cannot afford bathing ride public transit. In Toronto at least, every aspect of society uses it. There are professional sports players (Blue Jays, Raptors) that take transit to work and practice. There are Bay Street (think WallStreet.ca) high rollers that take the TTC (and GO, the regional rail system) to work.
Perhaps if you lived in an area that has infrastructure that is non-third world quality you'd have a different opinion. The TTC has many problems with it, but Toronto probably has better transportation options that 90% of American cities.
Too much gets said about how great electrically powered vehicles are, but they're only zero emission at point o suse. Not enough gets said about where the electricity to charge those batteries comes from - unless it's wind/solar/wave, then it's actually quite a lot of emissions in the overall system.
Why do you believe that? It seems every Slashdot article about electric vehicles has someone making this point. However, converting all of the world's power grids to renewable energy only solves 30% of the problem. By converting transportation to electricity and converting the power grids to renewable energy eliminates the majority of carbon emissions. We should do both.
You appear to be completely dismissing the value of electric vehicles because our electric grid doesn't have enough renewable energy. However, we have the resources to tackle both of these issues at once, and it seems to me we are succeeding.
Slashdot is not ignoring renewable energy, but electric transportation is important too.
One of our competitors trademarked the term "hypothesis". From now on, we will call them "boneheaded ideas".
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.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
Here in Winnipeg the city Transit service has been testing electric buses for a local coachbuilder for quite a few years with what I have heard to be good results.
http://winnipegtransit.com/en/...
King County is also already a large customer for their hybrid diesel-electric buses.
https://www.newflyer.com/buses...
If they can work well here in our cold winters and hot summers they can probably work well in most places in North America.
I can't see that happening in cities where buses carry 100-ish passengers. can you imagine how long a queue of small self-driving vehicles to replace that one bus load would be snaking into a city and when one stops, the gridlock that would cause?
"The hands that help are better far than lips that pray." - Robert Ingersoll (1833-1899)
...the main problem with most public transport is that it sucks...where it doesn't, everybody uses it, rich and poor...
I ride with everyone from poor moms with 2 kids in strollers and homeless folks to guys in 3 piece suits with $500 pairs of shoes. In between are everyone else from high school kids to college kids, and the breadth of the middle and upper-middle class workforce.
I bus about 35 minutes each way. I could drive that in 20-25 minutes, and there's an added 5-10 minute walk/wait on each end for the bus. End result is that I spend 80-90 minutes per day commuting on the bus for $50/month vs 40-50 minutes driving for ~$150/month (parking, gas, & wear and tear). The added advantage to busing is that I can do ~30 minutes of work each way, putting out fires before/after work, dropping an hour off my work day in the process.
So the end result is that I spend about as much time away from home busing as I would driving, for $100/month less. And that $100 can go straight into one of the bars or restaurants on the way home, an added perk of not having to drive.
Part of why I chose to live here was the investment in public transportation. When I consider moving jobs, I look at the commute possibilities as one factor. I'm generally not willing to give up my life and sanity driving in rush hour traffic. The year I did that I was far more stressed and angry than I ever was before or after. It's going to take a pretty significant pay raise to make me want to do that again.
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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.
I ride with everyone from poor moms with 2 kids in strollers and homeless folks to guys in 3 piece suits with $500 pairs of shoes. In between are everyone else from high school kids to college kids, and the breadth of the middle and upper-middle class workforce.
Generally I've found the people who complain most about public transport are the ones brought up in towns/suburbs designed around the car, and hence the public transport options do suck. I lived in Singapore for a couple of years and hardly anyone owns a car because there is no point. Public transport is faster, cleaner, safer, cheaper and more reliable than any other option. And it is the only transport option that scales in larger denser population centres.