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Comment by spongeb00b | Hacker News Reader

Electric buses seem to be fairly common in UK city centres. I first saw one in London about 4 years ago - it was surreal when walking past a typical red double decker at a bus stop and it just glided away with the faintest whirr.

I’m all for buses and taxis turning electric to reduce the diesel fumes in cities.

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Gliding away silently is often a hybrid. London does own electric buses, but mostly it has hybrids (and lots of conventional diesel buses).

If you were on the bus its engine probably started a minute later, it's still an improvement, and I assume that environmentally not spewing fumes at bus stops helps a little with local air quality, but it's not usually an electric bus.

Yeah, right on.

To put some numbers behind that it seems only ~1% of London's buses are electric whereas about a third are hybrid.

http://content.tfl.gov.uk/bus-fleet-audit-31-march-2018.pdf

Considering that most of a city bus's use is at low speed, constantly braking and accelerating from stops, the hybrid should be a huge improvement environmentally; it's the perfect use-case for a hybrid powertrain (where the ICE just runs at constant speed and charges the batteries, known as a serial hybrid vehicle).

Amsterdam also has a number of electric buses, though I'm not sure how many. I'm also glad to see lots of Teslas and Priuses as taxis. Clearly this is the low-hanging fruit for cutting back on fossil fuels: short range city traffic that's in constant use. It also improves the air quality in city centers.

How Ansterdam taxi drivers afford Teslas, btw?

Same way they used to afford the Mercedeses they had before, I suppose.

Given gas prices, cost of oil changes, and the number of miles being driven per year it probably makes economic sense.

It's too bad Toyota doesn't make battery-electric cars; they'd be the perfect car for a taxi. Teslas are expensive and not that reliable, but if Toyota decided they wanted to capture that market they should be able to dominate it with their reliability ratings.

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