Comment by nimbius | Hacker News Reader

Comment by nimbius | Hacker News Reader

Disclosure: im an engine mechanic for a small chain of diesel truck repair shops in the midwest. ive also done fleet maintenance for a city bus fleet.

The reasons electric buses arent seen more often are many, and they arent political at all.

- Tooling. Fleets generally maintain all the tooling necessary for specific make model and design of a vehicle. if that fleet gets large enough, they get a seat at the manufacturers table to help steer development and ensure a sustainable product that doesnt increase rider cost or decrease economy/comfort. Battery fleets would mean having to outfit shops with new training for high voltage, arc/flash suits, hot-sticks and other tools. Youre likely going to need to hire a few electricians to train and oversee people as well.

- lifecycle maintenance. As a fleet mechanic I know down to the day, minute, and hour when my motors are clapped out and when everything needs to be replaced. Diesel engines can run for several million miles if well maintained, but the lifecycle on a fleet electric vehicle is quite a bit more limited. A Cushman or Toyota fork lift for example is often entirely electric and sees a similar duty cycle (high tork, long service, low speed.) Replacement batteries are provided from a third party every year or two. Fleet operators in most US cities havent the slightest idea what the real-world operations lifecycle is for an electric bus. Its likely going to be pretty poor if youre operating these busses in places like Wisconsin winters or Arizona summers.

- Again, Tooling. If you told me I was in charge of a fleet of electric buses id probably quit. Youre talking about 50-60 busses for a small city, so youll need a set of substations dedicated for high speed charging. youll need your own PPD (Physical Plant maintenance) to handle generators during power outages, cooling during summer, and general repair. Your existing diesel fleet just requires a fuel dump and an apprentice mechanic. Youre also going to need to understand how to dispose of something that can, if punctured, explode into flames. Most oil recyclers in fleet operations pay you for the oil you give them and grant a discount on the new stuff. Ive never seen a fleet battery contractor for forklifts that has ever done more than pickup, drop off, and fees.

Ok. I actually drive an electric bus at a u.s. college, we have an all electric fleet of 20 electric buses. Sure it isnt a massive amount, but I believe the opposite about maintenance. They are much simpler to work on, and the batteries actually have a longer life span than the batteries in tesla and such, though I will agree that range is much worse than diesel buses. There are more initial setup costs involved, but in the long run electric will be the way to go.

Conflating lead-acid with lithium ion is a mistake; they're very different technologies. LiIon Battery durability is getting better at a very fast rate, and proper heating/cooling is a big part of that.

But the overall message is sound: you have to commit to a very different infrastructure if you want to make the change. Cities with an aging and/or poorly maintained diesel fleet are going to be better suited to making a 'clean break'.

China is pushing it through because it's a long-term investment. That makes sense for them. That doesn't mean that bus electrification is going to happen rapidly in the US.

> China is pushing it through because it's a long-term investment. That makes sense for them.

The question is why it'd be a good investment for china, but not for the US?

China is building whole new cities, and is still rapidly expanding the existing ones. It’s much easier to start from scratch with the latest technology when you don’t always have a big sunk investment in an older system.

Yep, it's the same reason many developing nations don't have any serious landline telephone infrastructure, but everyone has a smartphone. They didn't have landlines before, so as they got richer at the same time cellphones came along, they just skipped over the older technology and went straight to the new one.

They do have a much more serious air quality problem to deal with.

Everything here could have been similarly said about the change from horse-drawn buses to internal combustion. Wah - you can't just have a stable-boy feed them hay! Wah - you can't just clean up after them with a broom! Wah - you'll need to train people used to dealing with horses to deal with engines.

I don't think moaning about having to get new tools or training is particularly helpful in the grand scheme of things. If you are going to spend money on new buses, spending money on new tools is a given.

Buses seem like such a no-brainer for electrification, I'd hate to think that we're carrying on with diesel polluting our air and killing us just because the mechanics are losing their shit over having to do something new. Please wake up.

> Everything here could have been similarly said about the change from horse-drawn buses to internal combustion.

Except that's not how it went. In many cities, it went from horse-drawn to electric to internal combustion.

On the other hand, going from horse-drawn to internal combustion is a clear improvement, which isn't as obvious as going internal combustion to electric

Your reply is a bit snarky but I do tend to agree - and in fact if I was the GP I'd see it as an opportunity. Skill up on electric fleet maintenance, maybe do a certification, speak at a conference or two and suddenly you're an expert for ICE-to-electric fleet conversions, of which are are going to be thousands in the coming years. Play it right and you could parlay rapidly ageing skills in the old ways into a lucrative, high-demand role heralding in the new. Sounds pretty good to me?

In any technological sea change there are winners and losers. Winners sense the wind changing, adjust their sails, and charge bravely ahead. Losers linger adrift in denial, refusing to adapt until the maelstrom inevitably takes them. Hint: be a winner.

Lucrative government contracts? You are going to need a team of lobbyists and crony sales guys and millions of dollars to handle the overhead of businesses that deal in government. Actual knowledge of the subject matter will be way down the list of requirements to earn lucrative government contracts.

Most electric forklifts use lead acid batteries. These batteries are only warrantied for 1-2 years because they fail unpredictably after that time frame (hence why they get replaced on that time frame). They also take forever to charge and their performance and lifetime is highly dependent on temperature. Basically, they are a pain.

EV buses will not be using lead acid and will use longer life battery tech (e.g. Li-ion), so your reason #2 will not be as big of an issue.

A pain yes, but very easily recycled. The components of a lead acid battery are easily separated and each have a ready market to recycle them. Lithium ion batteries are complicated. No two models are identical. Many models change internally from year to year, change enough to frustrate recycling efforts. Their components are tightly layered and not readily separated mechanical. They may be better batteries but they are not necessarily better lifecycle components within a fleet of vehicles. That's why forklifts, golf carts, boats and cars are still being sold with lead acids.

They're still being sold with lead-acid batteries because they're cheap, and they're good enough for those applications. LiIon batteries are significantly more expensive, but if the application requires that performance (like EVs), then that's what you use. No one cares about having a golf cart with a 100-mile range.

Also it's one of the few chemistries that still operate at low temperatures. They're not so great for other vehicles due to weight, spills. A spill can turn your vehicle into a pile of rust.

It's at least a little political. After all politics is really mostly about allocating resources. All of your issues here are solvable with money. Most cities have the money to make that change, but due to politics choose not to.

I guarantee you when we really start feeling the effects of climate change and the politics on this turns, cities will be adopting electric bus fleets seemingly overnight.

Oh I absolutely agree. A lot of the foot dragging arguments I'm making are the same ones people made when busses started moving to compressed and liquid natural gas, and for what its worth I totally endorse getting at least started on electric fleets. "Ignore the problem" is not a good solution at all.

FYI, mining trucks and equipment are almost all electric. So are locomotives...even if that power comes from a diesel generator. One of the largest trucks in the WORLD is electric

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terex_33-19_%22Titan%22

In the German cities I lived in the fleets are very diverse (diesel, hybrids, purely electric). They must have worked something out, because I never once saw a broken bus in the last decade.

All of these are technical aspects that need to adapt to electric buses. They are not the cause of the absence of electric buses.

The root cause is indeed political.

The diversity of the HN audience in both knowledge and experience never ceases to amaze me. Thanks for your contribution.

> If you told me I was in charge of a fleet of electric buses id probably quit.

I thinnk you should probably grab it with both hands. You appear to have a good grasp of some of the problems - and it's likely to be the future.

If the city has a cable bus fleet then more than half of the tooling and training is already done. You also have the substation personeel and need to retrain them for mainataining a charging substation instead of a supply substation.

In my country you also get at 10% discount if you turn in your used car battery when getting a replacement. They need to recycle a used battery for every new one sold.

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