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Comment by ClumsyPilot | Hacker News Reader

"To further develop the idea of letting EVs go to people who will drive them the most"

We have a name for them - Bus Drivers!

Why is all the discussion is focused on personal cars, they sit idle 90% of the time. First vehicles to go electric should be bussed, light delivery vans, taxis and all other service vehicles that are in motion over 10 hours a day, 365 days a week.

Today 95% of all electric busses are in China, because our leadership thinks that since we don't have a planned economy, no planning of any kind is needed at all.

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IMO the case for all electric buses is a bit weakened by two things:

* for an electric hybrid bus with regenerative braking, the city bus is pretty much running on batteries most of the time anyways, because it never goes above 30MPH and there's so much stopping and starting to repower the batteries.

* in practice, BEB fleets need to be bigger than their diesel equivalent fleets because of the range anxiety. In particular, BEBs and their higher weight perform worse on elevation rises, where they are spending more energy to lug the heavier weight around, and in winter. Winter is interesting, because the way current bus heating works is that they take the waste heat from the ICE and dump that inside. Electrically heating a bus takes additional energy, and on top of that batteries perform worse in cold weather. The problem is severe enough that so far the most successful cold-weather BEBs maintain a fossil fuel system just to keep the bus warm.

We have some in Holland too. Works great. They accelerate quickly so buses don't hold up traffic and don't get many delays. Although it's too simple to suggest that by electrifying buses we save planet. Electric bikes are nice too, though fairly expensive. Most middle class folks have one. Electric cars don't seem to work at scale for now. Just unaffordably expensive and only economical for people who drive all the time and can charge on their own driveway.

Quick accelerate for family car is not needed but for bus is helpful to reduce traffic jam. I wish buses have at least hybrid powertrain.

I could not agree with you more, except for the small problem of range.

I'm not sure batteries will support vehicles being in motion 10 consecutive hours. And in some categories (busses, delivery bikes) it will be as lot more than 10 hours a day.

Maybe a 3 on, 1 off schedule would work (leaving it some time to charge) and that will have some capital implications (more actual vehicles in the fleet)

But I concur with the premise-work on reducing driven-miles not on "what percentage of vehicles" are electric.

For vehicles which are in nearly continuous use, the capital costs are essentially irrelevant next to fuel and maintenance, both of which are far cheaper for EVs. It might take a few years to pay for replacements.

Right, electrics can be optimized to a usage. Some buses could have capacitor banks recharged at every stop. That sort of tactic would be nonsense for a daily driver.

There is that in my city. A new bus line able to recharge bus capacitors at some stops. It looked like pretty hard to implement but it’s working interestingly well.

> I'm not sure batteries will support vehicles being in motion 10 consecutive hours. And in some categories (busses, delivery bikes) it will be as lot more than 10 hours a day.

The Toronto Transit Commission (TTC) is buying 300 all-electric buses:

* https://www.electrive.com/2021/04/27/toronto-to-procure-300-...

They currently have 60 as part of a pilot project, in addition to a whole bunch of hybrids.

It seems to be a case of pay now, or pay later:

> Besides the infrastructure cost of chargers, each electric bus can cost $200,000 to $500,000 more per bus than an average $750,000 diesel bus.

> Case acknowledges that is "significantly" more expensive, but it is offset by fuel savings over time, as electricity costs are cheaper. Because the electric buses have fewer parts than diesel buses, maintenance costs are also about 25 per cent lower and the buses are expected to be more reliable.

* https://www.cbc.ca/news/science/electric-buses-transit-1.582...

City buses seem like a great use case for battery swapping!

Depends a lot on the exact bus system, but thinking loosely about San Francisco: maybe retrofitting ~10 terminals with swap+recharge capabilities means most routes only need 1-2 hours of juice between swaps?

There’s a critical difference; convincing your local government to switch to electric buses is rather more difficult than choosing how to spend your own money.

If you're a local US government, you probably have trouble keeping the lights on, let alone justifying CapEx on more buses.

King County in Seattle recently costed a transition to all-electric: the conclusion was that it would cost 41% more than sticking with the current hybrids, and would be equivalent to reducing service by 237,000 hours annually. https://seattletransitblog.com/2020/11/02/metros-fleet-all-e...

Have they included emissions and healthcare considerations in those cost estimates?

Which causes less emissions, the amount of solo drivers you’d switch with all the lost service hours or the marginal electrification of hybrid buses that have regenerative braking, stop and go and don’t go above 30mph?

Well, one would imagine that the externalities are mitigated by the fact that they are spread. AGW isn’t even bad for that region: abundant water, solid local government, improved arable land.

Eh, if AGW leads to more events like the triple digit heat waves in a region that has less than half of all buildings AC-capable due to the mild climate, it's pretty awful.

A lot of local water also comes from snowpack built over winter, which has been decreasing.

If we omit the batteries, there have been electric buses since forever - trolley buses. They come also in hybrid variants too to serve more distant bus stops.

You're can do trolley buses with batteries as well, which charge while passing through central parts of their lines with overhead power, and discharge during the rest of their journey.

How heavy is an EV bus? Battery-electric cars are already pretty hefty for their class. Would a bus be even more so, to the point of being dangerously massive?

EV bus are not science fiction. There are a lot of them working everyday in a lot cities. So no, there is no such thing as dangerous weight.

In my city, most buses run on hydrogen. None run on batteries.

> Battery-electric cars are already pretty hefty for their class

A Tesla Model 3 weights roughly as much as its ICE equivalent (BMW 3 series).

But this doesn’t scale well. Buses will be pulling a lot more weight than a Tesla Model 3 or BMW 3er. And you’ve got the same problem with semi-trucks.

More weight to pull = more power required = more batteries required = more weight to pull. Almost a catch-22 when you factor in the increase in recharge time. For commercial vehicles, a minute of downtime is a minute of the said vehicle not making any money.

"being dangerously massive?"

What does this mean? Do you expect a bus to weigh more than a fully loaded truck? Trucks in uk weight up to 44 tons, the largest double-decker bus is 12.

LADOT and LA METRO are converting their bus fleets to electric. Its thousands of busses so these things take time.

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