Comment by fiftyfifty | Hacker News Reader

Comment by fiftyfifty | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

Even in terms of primary cost, diesel buses are expensive to maintain. My FIL was a mechanic for the local school district for 15 years, so I got a little insight into that aspect of the district. Our medium sized school district, 4 big high schools and all the feeder schools for them, employs around 6 full time mechanics plus their manager with all the equipment and the facility to work on the buses year round plus parts etc. It's not difficult to imagine that cost alone adds at least $1 million to our district's budget annually. In addition they have to have some percentage of extra buses because they are constantly rotating buses out for maintenance. They also have to have at least one extra bus and driver on standby every day because diesel buses breakdown regularly during a route and they have to go out with a second bus and pick up the kids and finish the route.

So if a district can outsource part of that maintenance cost, and electric buses prove to be lower maintenance and more reliable that their diesel counterparts, there are significant savings to be had for the school districts.

> diesel buses breakdown regularly

In comparison to what? Diesel engines in commercial vehicles are extremely reliable. It certainly could be possible for an electric bus to be more reliable, they certainly have less points of mechanical wear. However, there are a lot of power electronics going into charging their batteries and delivering the battery power to the motors.

He probably lived through the "Maxfarce" era in which the Navistar MaxForce diesels that everyone and their brother ran proved to be less reliable than the International 7.3 IDIs they were replacing. To be clear, they weren't unreliable, they just had a tough act to follow.

The diesel engines in the Thomas busses my school district had in the 90s would like to have a word with you. Those fuckers were always breaking down. lol.

Plus they smelled like death and produced gross amounts of black smoke.

Cummins diesels, Toyota diesels, Kubota diesels, Yanmar diesels Yes definitely.

US Detroit diesels? lol no.

DDC has been "detroit" in name only since the late '80s. First owned by Penske, then Daimler. The Series 60 and newer are perfectly acceptable diesels.

Most parts that break on a car are common to electric or engines. Suspension, brake fluid (the brakes might last longer but the fluid should be replaced every few years), tires, doors, seats.

> Most parts that break on a car are common to electric or engines. Suspension, brake fluid (the brakes might last longer but the fluid should be replaced every few years), tires, doors, seats.

It is true that a lot of parts are in common. But there are a lot of moving parts, susceptible to failure in an ICE not in electric.

I spent a lot of money recently fixing an oil leak and replacing the cam belt on my ICE. Routine maintenance (the leak specifically was not routine but leaks generally are).

My next car will be electric, I hope.

Sure, but I just spent a lot of money on my car fixing non engine related problems. Most of the moving parts in an engine are well lubricated and thus don't fail very often. The real expensive failure on any car is when road salt rusts the body away.

"Most of the moving parts in an engine are well lubricated and thus don't fail very often."

For all our family cars over last 30 years, 90% of repair cost was engine. Those oarts are under temperature, pressure and massive friction.

Can you name them? The engine is lubricated that well just because it gets the most wear and tear. The lubrication just tries to slow it down as much as possible. That's the reason why changing oil and filter is the first and foremost maintenance item on the list.

Shocks, struts and other suspension parts. After 10 years and 170k miles they were well worn.. these get a lot of wear and are not well lubricated,if only because unlike an engine they cannot be sealed.

Windshield was cracked.

Something in the TPMS was messed up.

Brake fluid change (another thing that few people do but should be done)

I didn't pay to fix the blind spot warning system, I want to but the repair costs is more than the car is worth.

Diesels, in general, are notoriously unreliable.

The only very selective myth I still hear repeated is that diesel engines are more durable now than they were, which isn’t saying much, and skirts around just how much else can and regularly does go wrong with a diesel-powered vehicle.

Flywheel clutches are an expensive nightmare, and the vibration destroys manifolds, cams and exhausts in short order.

That’s only for the dirtiest diesels that aren’t properly using DPFs or AdBlue (which if you’re seriously considering running school buses in 2022 and not using these, you’re a disgrace). Both of these fail regularly and cost a small fortune to replace.

There’s an entire underground industry dedicated to removing the particulate filters from Diesels to improve fuel economy and reliability (because I guess some people just hate kids, who knows?).

Electric vehicles have been around for well over a decade now, the data is back on them, and on the whole they are astonishingly reliable compared to the ICE vehicles they are replacing. There’s a lot of cables, sure, but they’re flexible and aren’t inherently moving parts.

If Diesel engines are so unreliable why are they used in practically every heavy goods vehicle, bus, tractor, plant equipment, ship and backup electric generator in operation today?

Torque.

I thought electric had better torque, ie acceleration...?

Which, incidentally, is also something electric motors are far superior at (flat curve...).

Not true. There are diesel engines that have warranties up to half a million miles.

The old ones "run on physics"

There absolutely are high warranty Diesel engines. That doesn't mean they'll last that long - a lot of those warranties are subsidised by servicing.

Even with that said (and as detailed above) there are so many other parts to a modern Diesel-powered vehicle that can and regularly do go wrong that they get a pass for because it's not in the engine block. I do wonder if this is because people just assume the vehicles are otherwise identical beyond the engine.

I agree, sorry to be tangential, but school buses even have a whole community around converting them into rvs/homes, skoolies. The advice thrown around most often within this community trends toward picking diesel over gas, because diesel ones are very reliable when maintained. I always read it's better to get a pre-2004 diesel bus, because they have simpler, more mechanical parts. Diesel engines are really hyped among skoolie enthusiasts, though of course that is not to say that in e.g. fb groups, you don't hear horror stories of people stranded with a broke-down rig, it's usually lack of maintenance though. When maintained, they do last well past when school districts retire them--maybe survivorship bias, the ones that lasted to the end were more likely to keep lasting. My boyfriend has one such bus that was made the same year he was born (1989) and it took us on a 10-state roadtrip and was our home for over a year.

Exactly. Take construction or military machinery as example : they are all running diesel. Who says that's not reliable? Probably after clocking more than 200.000 km and without maintenance. Motors on good shape and we'll maintained don't break down regularly

My father was a business manager for a few different school corporations. In at least one of them, the busses were all used - none were purchased new. It just wasn't worth it, and much cheaper to simply have an extra bus. You needed the mechanics regardless just to maintain them. You needed an extra driver anyway as well because people get sick. These aren't really the costs you are leading folks to believe they are, but part of overall cost savings.

One of the most wasteful (and expensive) things about school busses is that they are only used for school, which means they sit idle for much of the day. My father tried to work with at least one city to combine city busses with school busses - but state law (Indiana) forbid this since school busses were required by law to be the classic yellow with black markings.

I'll also add that outsourcing isn't without challenges, and the employees are often worse off. (I don't remember as many specifics right now: My father, who died 9 or 10 years ago, generally worked with custodial and cafeteria outsourcing.)

> I'll also add that outsourcing isn't without challenges, and the employees are often worse off. (I don't remember as many specifics right now: My father, who died 9 or 10 years ago, generally worked with custodial and cafeteria outsourcing.)

(In the following post I use "you" rhetorically, not talking about Broken_Hippo directly.)

Yeah. The body rental place makes it look like the killerest deal imaginable, like you get all the benefits of having human workers, minus actually having to deal with any human problems. No unions or strikes, if the body rental you're using gets organized it dies without the collateral damage to the renter, you just switch outsourcing unit. And there's tons of other human problems, and those human problems require other humans's help. They ought to get real, people are expensive, life is expensive, if something is more expensive than life we replace it with life.

There is this deal you can get where you pay about half market wages, almost exactly half, and there's no unionization or anything. Just have to worry about emigration. Called slavery, these days people focus on the whipping and the coercion, they forget if you're a slave your master will be disgustingly cheap with the things you need he must provide for you, because he knows it's literally painful to ask.

If you want something cheap and rather your money ends up spent on electricity than food, like who cares a joule's a joule, go, go and fire 100% of your workers and replace them all with machines. Sure to make a lot of money!

What will you spend it on, alternating current or direct current? What voltage are you compatible with?

>One of the most wasteful (and expensive) things about school busses is that they are only used for school, which means they sit idle for much of the day.

In my country's capital there is a plan of using a fleet of school mini-buses (as "taking kids to school" is among the top reasons why people say they still use a car for their daily commute), but also of putting these to work outside the narrow band of school start/end in other uses: taking old people to their doctors appointments, and commercial on-demand uberpool type transport.

My daughter takes an electric bluebird to school. It has broken down numerous times this year, it has even stopped mid-route due to low battery (no idea who's to blame for that). Nevertheless it's nice to see progress and things will get better.

> They also have to have at least one extra bus and driver on standby every day because diesel buses breakdown regularly during a route and they have to go out with a second bus and pick up the kids and finish the route.

I distinctly remember being one of those kids that would have to be picked up in another bus every once in awhile. This was before cell phones, so the bus driver had to walk to the nearest house (this was out in the country) and ask to use the phone. I think we had a problem bus for a few months where this happened fairly regularly until they swapped it out for a different one.

One time a passing vehicle kicked up a rock that took out the windshield. Nobody was seriously injured, but there was a fair bit of broken glass.

The buses in my small town all had radios (and quite a bit of chatter between drivers, as I recall). Were you in a district with very long distances or geography where that wouldn’t have been feasible?

My bus route wound over and between a couple of hills, so a radio might not have worked.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com