'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.

Comments

Re:How is this supposed to work?

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Incorrect!

[apoc.famine]

...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.