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Comment by tedshroyer | Hacker News Reader

Chattanooga has operated electric buses since the 1990s. I would be surprised if this wasn't known by many municipalities in the US, but still it hasn't taken off. Numbers from late 90s indicate that fuel and maintenance costs would be about 1/4 the cost of diesel( https://afdc.energy.gov/files/pdfs/chatt_cs.pdf). I guess range has been the problem stopping adoption.

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Buses seemed to me to be a rare case where they are so big and heavy anyway, that low energy density from a cheap and old-fashioned lead acid battery could still work. But you're right, I started searching, and found a 2005 US DOT analysis that said otherwise: https://www.transit.dot.gov/sites/fta.dot.gov/files/Electric...

> Consequently, powering a full-size bus would require a battery pack that is unacceptably large and heavy, as well as too costly to make a battery-electric bus commercially competitive.

There's only a few places where lead acid batteries have really proven viable for transportation and it's in forklifts where their weight is a benefit instead of a detriment and the actual ranges being traveled are extremely short. Everywhere else they're just way too heavy to get workable ranges at reasonable weights.

Yeah the problem is that there are few opportunities for the bus to recharge, they generally don't stop long.

An interesting alternative is modern In-Motion Charging (IMC) buses: stick reasonably big batteries on a trolleybus, when overhead wires are available the trolley uses them and recharges the batteries; and it can run for some time on batteries so it's not as bound to OHL as traditional trolleys.

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