The Torsus Praetorian 4×4 school bus (2020) | Hacker News Reader

The Torsus Praetorian 4×4 school bus (2020)

autoexpress.co.uk

32 pointsapp4soft48 comments

Url changed from https://www.thedrive.com/news/37235/the-torsus-praetorian-4x..., which points to this.

disclosure: I am a diesel mechanic and i work on large commuter busses as well.

Do you want the money to go to schools and learning, or opulently thumbing your nose to kris kringle two or three days a year. I thought remote learning had basically axed the snow day anyway...a few big issues:

0. you cannot load a child onto a vehicle thats 2 feet off the ground.

1. most school bus drivers in the US dont have a CDL. now try to find one willing to pilot a half million dollar all wheel nine speed with electronic transfer (while screaming kids are in the back) and youll find skilled over the road drivers arent interested in this.

2. any driver you do find wants lot pay, holidays, benefits and 80k a year guaranteed. school bus drivers earn just a little more than minimum wage for about half a years work.

3. whoever you get to drive this still has an option to tell you to pound sand. most OTR long haulers or regional drivers will never drive in conditions too adverse to control the vehicle.

4. this vehicle might make it through a bad snow storm but not at a speed youre likely to enjoy. the kind of storms this thing is rated to tackle, most kids arent.

5. IF it becomes stuck, or the driver isnt competent, youve turned a regrettable snow day into a massive rescue effort that imperils dozens of kids.

Also, is that thing gonna pick up the front office staff, the teachers, janitors or any security staff? Food vendors for lunch programs or other supply vendors.

There's so much more than just kids walking to school up hill both ways in the snow.

For an area that doesn't have a lot of snow days, it's as much the operational logistics and cost of running the school during a snow day as it is getting the kids there.

You have all your regular shit, plus traffic is going to move slower, because that's how it works in the snow, so people are late or have to start earlier, you have to clear enough snow (and possibly maintain that through out the day) so that there isn't a neglegent risk in injury. Most schools are pretty much right at or below capacity for staffing in a good day, let alone one where they start late with extra chores.

And for all that what do you get? A bunch of kids spacing out wishing they were sledding.

> Also, is that thing gonna pick up the front office staff, the teachers, janitors or any security staff? Food vendors for lunch programs or other supply vendors.

Of course not, but they're adults who are expected to put their lives and personal property on the line and drive into work anyway. Just look at how few snow days college staff get, or any other "non-essential" worker. Or the workplace that says "safety first" but still expects you to hit to highway in a foot of snow.

most school bus drivers in the US dont have a CDL.

Great post generally but I don't think this is true, it doesn't jive with the bus driver friends I've known nor with a quick Google. A CDL is defined in California and most states I know of a license for someone transporting passengers or cargo for pay - and the Feds set the standard[1]. You drive your own 40' RV with a car license but driving ten kids in a van requires a CDL (commercial drivers license), not necessarily the same qualifications as a big driver but still a CDL.

[1] https://www.fmcsa.dot.gov/registration/commercial-drivers-li...

But still, a school bus driver indeed isn't going to qualified to drive some random. The 4x4 school bus idea is indeed dumb.

A rural school district that I work with has to close the entire district during bad weather a few times a year because of three unpaved roads that prevent buses from reaching a small number of students. If they only had one or two of these they might be able to avoid closing school.

In another district, a couple of buses have to drive more than 3000 miles a year further because they aren't allowed to drive on a road that has standing water across it occasionally, so they have to drive many extra miles to go around. Having one or two of these might avoid that. Bus drivers could potentially work an hour less per day for the same pay, which would be the result. Rural districts around here tend to pay drivers for a minimum number of hours worked per day.

There are probably many instances where a district having a small number of these, rather than replacing the entire fleet, could solve real world problems in a way that benefits the district, students, and drivers.

Or they could just pave the roads?

> you cannot load a child onto a vehicle thats 2 feet off the ground.

Even if you could, you still can't load kids in wheelchairs onto this bus.

Plus, there's the fact that there are kids who are inside the school's walk zone, or the part of the school's attendance zone the district has decided is too close to the school to be worth a bus trip. If the weather's bad enough that you're bringing out Frostilicus Maximus here, a number of parents in that zone will decide to keep their kids home and get rather irate when the school decides that such an absence merits an in-school suspension.

There are no photos (article seems to include only renders), and no easy way to get a sense of scale. But if this is really designed for children: What about ingress and egress?

Using the one measurement: "14.4 inches of ground clearance".. the first ladder-step is 16-18" off the ground, with the second being perhaps a little closer.. maybe 15" above (this is just a guestimate from the images). There are no obvious hand holds. It's not clear if the bottom of the door ends at the metal/bumper divide or in the bumper section (possibly the small orange light is on the door), but perhaps the door provides a small amount of climbing assistance (on one side only). How is a small child, someone not particularly agile, or even someone later in life going to board (climbing?) or exit (jump?) this thing? Especially with cargo? It's strange they mention the decoration on the seats, but not how it could actually be used.

Update: The Torus website[0] (which this article (by way of a another by Auto Express) just seems to be printing a press releases from) goes into a bit more detail, there is a mid-body door which can optionally have a pneumatic pop-out step, which will improve things (it's still a steep decline - would children be expected to board here too?) Only renders there too. Auto Express estimates the bus approximately costs an eye watering $475K USD

[0]: https://torsus.eu/en/praetorian/school-bus

> "14.4 inches of ground clearance".. the first ladder-step is 16-18"

I would be less concerned with in/egress but more with dead kids due to them getting under the bus. There is a reason most busses (and trucks) in countries with proper road laws have required ground clearance shielding on all large vehicles to avoid people getting under them and being driven over. This is a massive step back in that respect and idiotic for a non existent usecase since the kids will be brought to a school which is closed anyway due to every other person not being there.

edit: and I mean this for all the other 360 days of the year since it won't be in the shed and only come out for snowy days.

A lot of buses, both school and commercial, come with extra equipment to help people board. If this thing is to be outfitted as a school bus, presumably it would have extra steps or a ramp or something as an add-on.

They have other Torsus buses that are basically the same vehicle, I'm sure you can find some.

> How is a small child, someone not particularly agile, or even someone later in life going to board (climbing?) or exit (jump?) this thing? Especially with cargo?

"With assistance and some modest level of risk", I'd imagine.

It's a fun looking piece of equipment, but it costs at least twice what a ordinary, brand new school bus costs. And as other posters point out, school buses see a lot of miles during their lifetimes.

In the northern US, excluding Alaska, I _think_ that most school districts try to keep snow days (cancelations) under 5/year, and the average is lower.

I doubt it would make sense to pay at least twice as much for buses in order to allow schools to open 3 to 5 more days per year. How many districts in the world see enough snow days to make this worthwhile?

This looks like a marketing stunt and little more. Places where you'd need to use an off-road school bus, the density would probably be too low for a bus to make sense at all.

And a lot of kids don't even take the bus anyway, nor do staff, so I don't see how this helps eliminate snow days, but yeah this is mostly an ad

Cities that would get snow locked often tend to operate a snow plow fleet.

School buses need to last for decades. Lots of school buses have 250k+ miles on the odometer. When I was in highschool, I rode on a school bus with over 1 million miles. The thing was ancient and you could feel every gear change.

A different perspective: it's weird that school buses that only run two routes per day exist. That has to be one of the most underutiluzed forms of public transport.

My home country Australia has free public transport for children. The public transport system gets kids to school and back with no issues. You don't get drivers and busses underutilized either.

They don't only run two routes per day; most US districts stagger elementary, middle, and high-school start times so the same busses can be used for all of those systems.

(this leads to other problems with kids waking up early, ofc)

> My home country Australia has free public transport for children

I am not opposed to this when possible, but I'm suspicious of the implication that Australia either has (1) convenient, frequent bus service in all suburbs or (2) no suburbs.

Edit: little bit of research:

> The vast majority of schools in Australia (both government and private) do not have their own buses for transporting children between the school and their home and thus most school children in Australia that do travel by bus travel on public transport buses, either on standard scheduled public transport routes, or on specific 'school travel' routes. Most school routes do not allow the general adult public to ride along with the children, although this does vary by location according to practicality (i.e. remote areas) and local regulation.

Ok yeah so you end up with kids-only "school routes" for a lot of public busses when public transit doesn't align, nominally within the same public transit system... cool, but that doesn't really seem completely different from the US system.

> kids-only "school routes" for a lot of public busses when public transit doesn't align

The same vehicles and probably the same drivers (or a subset) are used, which should cost less.

I think it's only the USA and Canada that have a separate design of vehicle for school buses.

(Why are American school buses such an old design? E.g. this [1], which is the first modern one listed on the Wikipedia School Bus article, has a high enough cab that it needs loads of mirrors for the driver to see around, and has a high floor (so several steps to get in).

A typical bus used in European cities is this Mercedes [2]. The driver has a better view, there is only the one step to get in, and it can be lowered [3].)

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Saf-T-Liner_C2

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mercedes-Benz_Citaro

[3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dr5BSIFB_GY

> I am not opposed to this when possible, but I'm suspicious of the implication that Australia either has (1) convenient, frequent bus service in all suburbs or (2) no suburbs.

From what I observed in Queensland... a mix of both, actually. There are suburbs, but the distance from CBD to bush is much shorter than the corresponding distance in the USA. At the same time, there is an extensive public transit network that competing private carriers participate in. The government sets routes and establishes the payment system, the carriers drive the routes and and keep prices reasonable and the service good. I was quite pleasantly surprised by Queensland's bus network.

Here is "How Ukrainians Created the Worlds First Off Road Bus" official post by Torsus Off Road Bus, posted after being interviewed[0,1] by "European Pravda" in August 2018:

> The EP (European Pravda -ed.) learned Ukrainians managed to create the world’s first off road bus, within a year, and why they want to buy it in the US, Australia, Canada, Bangladesh, Georgia and New Zealand.[1]

> In parallel, the company is in talks with representatives of car factories in the US, Turkey and Ukraine, on the launch of large scale production. Requests for a bus have already arrived from the US, Australia, Canada, Georgia, Bangladesh and New Zealand.

[0] https://twitter.com/epravda/status/1029613756165369856

[1] https://www.epravda.com.ua/publications/2018/08/15/639623/

[1] http://web.archive.org/web/20190208234645/https://www.torsus...

Thats weird, because off-road busses have been operating in NZ for at least 30 years.

eg the farewell spit tourist operation

https://www.google.com/search?q=farewell+spit+bus&tbm=isch

I recall these used to be built on unimog bodies, so incredibly capable, but underused/expensive.

And various truck-based busses used for skiing in winter, and adventure tourism in summer

eg https://queenstownweddings.org/listing/nz-ski-bus-charters-2...

Congratulations, Torsus, you have made simultaneously the best and worst thing ever for an eight-year-old boy. You get to ride to school in a monster truck... on days that school would've normally been cancelled.

Yes please. I'll come back in 10 years to get the used version and convert it into an off-road RV.

Remote learning may not be perfect, but to the extent we truly need to "end all snow days", it seems like it should be sufficient, no?

Remote “learning” is worthless for most kids. Just more work for adults than nothing at all

I rode to school in a bus every day and some days there were a foot of snow, on a bad day more. Temps could be -30 degrees and I’d happily wait for the bus. I don’t remember a bus getting stuck once, and not one day of school being closed.

The reason this worked wasn’t because the buses were 8x8 monsters or that they even had winter tyres or snow chains. These were regular buses. Often articulated ones. The reason it works is because if there is a foot of snow over night, it’s cleared by 7 am. That’s where you invest if you want to go to school all year and it snows from October to April.

But for most places such as Britain, or continental Europe outside of mountain regions this isn’t an issue you’d spend money dealing with. It’s better to have a snow day now and then and put the snow plow money towards more teachers or better public transport.

The bus isn't the problem. They use school busses in all sorts of vocational environments (e.g oil field) that can be characterized as "mud pit". The (typically) elderly driver and insane parents who screech about safety at the mere hint of a dusting are the problem.

Where do you live? Snow is common enough throughout nearly the entire northern half of the lower 48 that "the mere hint of a dusting" is not enough to call a snow day. Where I grew up in the northeast, it practically took a whiteout before they would call school off.

Cute gimmick, but not being able to get school busses through the snow are not why schools have snow days. They do it because they don't want kinds dying of exposure while waiting at the bus stop.

>but not being able to get school busses through the snow are not why schools have snow days.

I think schools suspend class during heavy snow (definition depends on locale) but most snow days are warmer than the coldest days of winter and they do not suspend school due to "freezing days" with exceptions for extremely cold days.

Yeah, or teachers getting to school? Probably lots of reasons, including a lack of funding for expensive busses in places where it doesn't snow enough to have plows at the ready.

The Drive on Twitter:

> Sorry, the Torsus Praetorian 4x4 school bus is here to end all snow days:[0]

[0] https://twitter.com/thedrive/status/1484752697978990597

Places like Tromsø would love this:

1. Temperatures don't get too cold, rather there is too much snow 2. Normal vehicles get stuck on non-snowdays. Its not about "snow days", its about regular operation. 3. Tons of money

Looks like a ПАЗ with bells and whistles.

https://i.artfile.ru/1920x1320_1507055_[www.ArtFile.ru].jpg

And then came covid and did away with the snow day first, for free.

> A 6.9-liter turbodiesel inline-six engine sends 290 horsepower and 848 pound-feet of torque

Seems a bit anachronistic in 2022, no?

If you want a ton of power and torque, why wouldn't you go electric?

The school districts/bus company would have to install electric chargers, which while could come out cheaper overall, is still a tougher sell than a standard engine.

Long term reliability and maintenance costs need to be proven.

How do you prove the long-term reliability of a new engine design?

An electromagnetic motor and drivetrain is incredibly simple

Testing, and time. Whether we like it or not, diesel engines are used for many heavy duty applications, such as trucks, generators, etc.

Don't forget the batteries... which are not known to work well in low temperatures.

This thing looks silly to me here in the US but reminds me a lot of the dump trucks, garbage trucks and touring vans I saw in Iceland. Now THOSE were trucks! :)

As someone who grew up in "northern" canada, snow days always confused me.

It snowed. We went to school. We didn't get snow days.

this looks like a rendering. how is it "here" ?

Looks like a Tonka or Hot Wheels toy.

Obligatory mention of the Madeline Island ice sled:

https://northinfocus.com/2021/02/12/a-ride-on-the-wind-sled-...

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