EV school bus

[JeffKeryk]

Very cool car! If I had your electricity deal I would consider leasing an EV but no way is that happening here. With "taxes and fees" it drives my .37c kWh rate over .40c with no cheap night rate and no buy back from solar which cost 50K+.
Now I only drive about 4K a year and have too many cars that are mostly just toys, I drove the VW Beetle diesel to Boston today a 100 mile round trip on approx 2 gal of diesel or about $8, I can live with that, I love the diesel engines.

My wife's father was a PhD from UCLA who worked at the Napa State Hospital. That's where the sickest of the mentally ill lived, including many catatonics. In 65 he was looking for a family car and got a good deal on the 65 4-4-2. It now has 97K and has to be one of the most original ones left. The trans leaks and there are no more Switch Pitch parts left. I love my Oldsey and it is Sue's connection to her father.

 

[y_p_w]

My wife's father was a PhD from UCLA who worked at the Napa State Hospital. That's where the sickest of the mentally ill lived, including many catatonics. In 65 he was looking for a family car and got a good deal on the 65 4-4-2. It now has 97K and has to be one of the most original ones left. The trans leaks and there are no more Switch Pitch parts left. I love my Oldsey and it is Sue's connection to her father.
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How many miles? I remember a relative had a 70s Cutlass Supreme and the odometer rolled over at least once, although it also needed an engine rebuild before it hit 100,000 miles.

 

[JeffKeryk]

How many miles? I remember a relative had a 70s Cutlass Supreme and the odometer rolled over at least once, although it also needed an engine rebuild before it hit 100,000 miles.

Almost 98K. Always garaged in sunny CA. First in Redondo Beach and then in Petaluma.

 

[y_p_w]

Almost 98K. Always garaged in sunny CA. First in Redondo Beach and then in Petaluma.

So it hasn't rolled over yet. I was thinking maybe it did. Of course my kid was in my wife's Civic was about to hit 100K miles and said I should take a photo of it.

 

[PandaBear]

I wonder sometimes about how this is going to work long run. Obviously school buses have that limited, defined role. However, I've never ridden a school bus for any kind of daily transportation to school and my child has never done so. That's fairly rare in our district other than for special needs students who might need to go to a specialty program. I did find one neighborhood school that's using a temporary campus (a decommissioned middle school grounds with temporary buildings) that the district still owns and has partially leased out to a private school. For that they're providing school buses to students requesting it since it's several miles away.

I went to a Catholic elementary school for several years, and our only use of school buses was for field trips. The same was the case for most field trips in junior high and high school. I've also ridden school buses for remote parking. I took my family to the Berkeley Kite Festival once, where parking was at the Golden Gate Fields racetrack and it was all school buses. But for that the drivers were probably making extra money and the private school bus operators were free to use their fleets. It might make for an interesting use case for an electric school bus. That was just a couple of miles so maybe 30 round trips a day was doable, but then they would need to be able to recharge. However, it's probably a similar issue with diesel buses where they might have to find a fleet refueling station (life a CFN affiliate).

My understanding is, in California we voted out the requirement for school to provide bus to children. This is not the case in other states so relatively speaking, we don't have that many school bus in California.

As I said before, my daughter's middle school has like 1200 students and only 4 large 2 small buses, and the elementary school of 600 students have only 1-2 short buses. Basically only those kids who cross a railroad track or freeway got bus services (for safety reason).

 

[PandaBear]

I drove a school bus for almost 3 years as part of my post retirement boredom elimination routine.
depends on school district what the start times are for different schools and if they mix age levels of students but generally 3 sets of schools, start one hour apart.. hi school, middle school, elementary...
and they will always be distance limited to about how far they can get in aabout 20 minutes before they need to turn around pick up students and drive them 20 minutes back to school...

I had alonger route and it amounted to 140 miles a day..
I had a shorter route in the city and it was only about 60 miles a say.
machine sits parked for about 16 hours a day and more on holidays and weekends.
it could be done

It really depends on the district. In my 'district' we are only about 7-8 miles in diameter and we don't really use those buses much more than special need and crossing railroad track, plus we have a lot of solar panels in school parking lots (for the teachers, not students). Most middle and high school students without parents pickup drop off will just take the public bus routes, and the public bus route add an extra schedule to match the school, so there really isn't the same need for school bus like the rural one. I think in our case they probably just use the solar panel to charge the buses during day time instead of feeding electricity back to the grid, and they probably can charge them really cheap.

Also the labor to change brake pads and filling up diesel cost the school district labor as well, so that's probably some saving involved. Reliability would be a concern initially, until the technology mature and everyone is reliable there's always a risk.

 

[PandaBear]

yep... give you an idea how a transit system is supposed to do it in the USA. Transit bus has a projected 12 year 500,000 mile service life.
School systems are similar but different...

intelligent transit agency will replace 8.5% of their fleet every year, constantly retiring and putting into service new vehicles so there is an even number of aged vehicles across the fleet..

not so intelligent transit agency will purchase a large group of buses all at once.. to replace a bunch of worn out crap..
in ten or twelve years they will face the cost and task of replacing another large group of vehicles at the same time.

when a organizations replace a large percentage of their fleet all at once,
the maintenance and repairs tend to comes in peaks and valleys instead of being spread out...
and later in vehicle life the engines and transmissions all tend to crap out at the same time.

Sometimes there is a need to replacing equipment fleets (not just school buses, something like servers and airplanes) all at once. Safety being one (if they found a safety issue that cannot be fixed without going new design), energy efficiency or cost of ownership improvement being another (say your fuel economy improve 20% or your maintenance schedule can extend 30% to save labor cost), then it make sense for high utilization fleet to retire early (sell to someone else instead of crushing them) and buy new ones (with financing or leasing).

 

[MSCH]

Sometimes there is a need to replacing equipment fleets (not just school buses, something like servers and airplanes) all at once. Safety being one (if they found a safety issue that cannot be fixed without going new design), energy efficiency or cost of ownership improvement being another (say your fuel economy improve 20% or your maintenance schedule can extend 30% to save labor cost), then it make sense for high utilization fleet to retire early (sell to someone else instead of crushing them) and buy new ones (with financing or leasing).

funny thing with a thing like buses is you can't go buy them like you can a Toyota at a dealer... can be a two year lead time on buying one you ordered... and if you order 500 of them, it is really going to take awhile.

 

[Jetronic]

This is the place I used to work as a bus mechanic.... it went up in flames last night.

13 EV busses and 11 diesels gone, 700 solar panels, all charging infrastructure and the workshop + car wash.

So far it seems the fire started in the workshop, and not from a bus battery catching fire.

The fire department got the fire to go out after 1 hour, the air pollution wasn't poisonous but the insulation from the building caused soot particles.



I must admit, I expected the EV busses were the cause

 

[350Rocket]

This is the place I used to work as a bus mechanic.... it went up in flames last night.

13 EV busses and 11 diesels gone, 700 solar panels, all charging infrastructure and the workshop + car wash.

So far it seems the fire started in the workshop, and not from a bus battery catching fire.

The fire department got the fire to go out after 1 hour, the air pollution wasn't poisonous but the insulation from the building caused soot particles.



I must admit, I expected the EV busses were the cause

Wow, that will be expensive.

 

[Jetronic]

Wow, that will be expensive.

I'm not sure but been told some of those EV busses sold for $1m. Those had long range so big batteries

 

[Jetronic]

About the fIre posted above. I've heard (hearsay, caveat) that there was a bus charging in the workshop overnight, and the charger or electric cabinet caught fire. The bus was not supposed to be charged there so insurance payout isn't certain. They're buying every available bus they canb get there hands on right now. All diesels of course, and all aged. Public transport rules say they can be 15 years old max, so likely 2010 models that others retired

 

[350Rocket]

About the fIre posted above. I've heard (hearsay, caveat) that there was a bus charging in the workshop overnight, and the charger or electric cabinet caught fire. The bus was not supposed to be charged there so insurance payout isn't certain. They're buying every available bus they canb get there hands on right now. All diesels of course, and all aged. Public transport rules say they can be 15 years old max, so likely 2010 models that others retired

The environment is very sad right now. And not about the old diesel buses. Lol.

 

[hrv]

Louisville spent over 9 million dollars on nine electric busses for public transportation TARC...They are all broke and have been sitting for over 3 years now...A total waste of money...