Paris suspends electric bus fleet after two fires | Hacker News Reader

Paris suspends electric bus fleet after two fires

lemonde.fr

81 pointsjjensen87 comments

Don't take this as an indictment of all electric buses. London has over 500 electric buses (out of 9,000). A lot of the buses in my neighborhood are the new electric double-decker ones and it's extremely nice. They are quieter, run smoother, don't polute the air, and have cool features like USB charging at every seat. It is like riding in a Tesla - just an obviously better bus experience. It will just take some time to get all the tech worked out everywhere as all these buses are custom spec and not mass produced models yet, but we will get there.

This page has good info but doesn't include the newest batch of buses yet: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Low_emission_buses_in_London

This is just great! Now they need electric taxis. Hopefully the end of the black snot!

Where I live (UK town) our biggest local taxi firm has an app and an entirely electric fleet. So we're getting there!

Would you say more about the connection between black snot and ICE taxis?

The reason I ask is that I was under the impression people commonly get black snot from the the tube (eg. https://www.reddit.com/r/london/comments/16jjgt/london_why_d... ).

Thanks to the ULEZ (ultra-low emission zone) in London, this is very much already happening — anecdotally (because I can't find any easy numbers right now, everything I can find is from 2020) a huge number of the private and public taxis in London are now hybrid or full electric.

Apparently there are already 5k TX electric taxis out there, which is a good start:

https://levc.com/levc-celebrates-sale-of-5000th-tx-electric-...

https://levc.com/tx-taxi/overview/

Live in central London and usually walk everywhere, never experienced or even heard of black snot. Pretty sure it’s only a thing for the tube-travelling demographic.

>It is like riding in a Tesla

Not sure it is an advantage. My city had electric troley buses for many years. People are complaining about fast acceleration. Some bad drivers just slams gas with bus full of standing people.

well that's easily fixed in software. tesla would actually be the best example for it.

Seems like some telemetry-based performance bonuses might be in order. You drive smoothly? You get a bonus.

Electric buses are not a new hip thing, we have had electric buses since forever. It's called a trolleybus. At the moment its in every way superior to batteries.

This. It's astonishing that someone would put batteries into these things.

I'm not an expert, but I would think creating or changing existing routes for trolleybuses would require setting up overhead wires, which probably need a few things to be in place beforehand. Isn't that just slower/costlier than simply driving on a different street? What about intercity routes? Doesn't sound superior to me on that front.

edit: grammar

Changing routes isn't really that frequent once you have a working setup.

As for intercity travel, this should be set up as rail, not a bus, in basically 100% of cases.

I've been to major European cities in the last few weeks, Paris, London, Edinburgh, all of them, with no exception had bus routes changed temporarily because of construction, protests, events etc. Of course it's frequent.

Most trolleybuses I know have independent emergency propulsion and can reattach without too much difficulty at specific places (usually stops). So temporary short rerouting isn't difficult. Apparently they even have trolley/battery hybrids in zurich where the battery is used as part of normal operation (claiming to need wires only for ~half of the route).

Don't trolleybuses require overhead wires? Doesn't that mean you would need to retrofit all routes with poles, cables, etc? How do they cope with diversions?

I can't see it as being superior in every way. In most cities where I've spent significant time with the public transit system, it's relatively common for the buses to need to reroute around things like road construction and street festivals. Also, buses frequently need to pass other buses on the same route that are stopped due to equipment problems or running slowly due to overcrowding. A trolleybus would have a hard time dealing with those sorts of things.

It's also, I would guess, a lot more difficult to get off the ground. With battery powered buses, you just buy however many buses, and throw them on whatever pre-existing route. With a trolleybus, you need to install the overhead wire system before you can get started.

And then, I would imagine the overhead wire system itself becomes a problem. Do you have to worry about transporting oversize loads on or across the same streets? Is it going to become another electrocution hazard for people who need to work above the street? etc.

That's not to say there aren't advantages to trolleybuses, too. Just that the claim that it's "in every way superior to batteries" is an overreach.

What about an hybrid solution? Smaller batteries could let trolleybuses venture from their infrastructure as needed, but at a reduced cost.

We had this here in the Netherlands, the system broke down quite a lot and apparently had quite some wear and tear

I guess it can be improved thoug.

How do they re-attach the bus to the power lines? Is it reasonably automatic, or does the driver have to fuss with it?

It's not an overreach, trolleybuses work surprisingly well at the moment. Lighter, much, much cheaper, less electricity required. And you need less of them.

Metro, trams, trolleybuses should be used primarily and then you can add electric buses for gaps. That would make sense, not trying to go straight for the most expensive and wasteful option.

How can they be cheaper? You still need to install all the overhead wiresm this only works if you assume they the routes never change. And will require an absurdly huge initial investment. Might be better/cheaper to just see if batteries get better or if more quick charge points can he installed.

The vehicules are have less components thus are both cheaper upfront and cheaper on at operation by being lighter and requiring less maintainance. Because of that they are on average bigger so you can have a smaller fleet. Also installing overhead cables isn't such a big investment (in the face of related urban investment needed anyway like road maintainance, street furnitures and traffic/lanes shaping). Remember that tons of cities install christmas decorations with similar overhead wires just for one month every year.

I wonder how many more passengers a trolley bus can carry, compared to a battery powered bus of the same size

The buses I've seen are still capable of going under their own power, and they can easily attach/detach from the wires: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9k1z10U3utc

So detours and overtakings are no big deals.

Trolleybus routes require additional costs for maintenance. This might be significant

Otoh vehicule maintenance, cost and energy use is smaller.

Superior in every way except for massive infrastructure costs, unsightly wires or rails, and fixed routes, I suppose.

No. I live in a city with wires but many buses go from the city into the surrounding areas. And to put up wires threw all the lower density areas where people live is just a bad idea.

Modern batteries can go for decades.

A battery based system is far more flexible, you can uses buses all over the place and dynamically adjust routes based on demand.

Overhead wires are also significantly ugly to have in a city.

> Don't take this as an indictment of all electric buses.

Exactly, or any electric vehicles. Interesting to see this here to remind others that a bad electric bus should not spoil the bunch of other electric buses.

> It will just take some time to get all the tech worked out everywhere as all these buses are custom spec and not mass produced models yet, but we will get there.

Yes. There will always be issues in the technology and it takes time to iron the issues out. Question is with that specific manufacturer / developer / maintainer however is whether if partners or clients are going to wait for fixes to be resolved or will they move to a competitor or back to the status quo.

> don't polute the air

It does pollute the air, but not at the same place (where the energy is produced) and not where the bus is running (in town)

Pretty sure net pollution is reduced because power plants can burn fuels more efficiently than the ICE in a vehicle, and the power plants don't have to idle or waste energy with friction braking.

But I don't have a source on hand.

Polluted air in high density city environments is far more damaging to far more people.

And much of the energy can come from renewables or whatever energy is available for cheap at night.

The city of Hamburg has changed a large portion of its fleet to electric and I love it. They are quite, they don't stink and in the last 5 years there have been no major incidents.

Just like all technology, there may be some fault in the busses used in Paris and until investigation is complete they should be suspended.

Battery fires are a general problem that needs a better solution but that doesn't chip on the rest of the benefits.

Here is a video of the fire : https://www.leparisien.fr/video/video-bus-en-feu-a-paris-reg...

Comparably intense, here is a video of an electric bus fire in India:

http://www.jimstoneindia.com/pagesq22022/page2v.html

In the past we have had electric bus with electricity coming from an aerial network, surely they have some limits, but they are the sole logic design for a city. A small battery just to emergency maneuver but nothing more.

It's FAR cheaper and it's already proved they can last 50+ years without much maintenance.

Batteries are meaningful for cars and trucks waiting for some aerial electrical network like starting from highways, so again we need smaller batteries just to being able to travel on 100Km (~60+miles) ranges.

Even better: trams and light rail. Smoother ride and no particulate from tyres.

Electric wire bus is better than tram as it does not require expensive tracks. It is also much easier to change the route. The tracks also create a lot of noise and vibration that gets into nearby buildings. Tracks are also dangerous for bicycles, and slippery for cars and trams.

There might be benefits with trams, but I do not know what.

The main benefit of trams is that multiple cars can be coupled together.

And comfort. Streetcars on rails are so smooooth, compared to buses where it's always a bumpy ride.

> Streetcars on rails are so smooooth

They should be, at least. San Francisco runs historic (interesting, attractive) cars on the Market Street line, some of which sound and feel like the rails are surfaced with gravel.

Every time I ride one of the orange cars from Milan Italy, I am reminded that the Milanese in the 1930s had bigger things to worry about, and that I should just get over it. :)

> There might be benefits with trams, but I do not know what.

Good tram systems don't share the asphalt except at intersections making public transportation a win for the individual which in turn reduces traffic. Buses always suck, that is an important part of their design.

Not having a consumable battery pack which has to be replaced, and mineral resources expended upon making new sets?

There is obviously a trade off, some routes are obviously suitable to trams, some others to buses, be they all electric or hybrid. So possibly in ICE mode out of urban areas, and on battery within?

> expensive tracks

Trams and trains are incredibly energy efficient even with heavy loads because of that.

In the long term their TCO wins.

> Tracks are also dangerous for bicycles, and slippery for cars and trams

Not really. Besides, bicycles should have their lanes anyways.

Overhead wires take a lot of maintenance - point of reference, Vancouver BC's transit authority reported maintenance costs per km were actually higher for their electric trolleys than both their diesel and CNG buses. And having lived with them, being effectively restricted to being 'on rails' leads to challenges in traffic or road closures where traditional buses would re-route down a different street.

I think battery-buses are the future - the ability to roll and change routes without capital infrastructure set up will be king

https://www.translink.ca/-/media/translink/documents/about-t... (page 77, PDF page 90)

Thanks for the report, not so easy to source valuable information!

I nevertheless object with a side reasoning: costs are complex beast, in an age of scarcity, where oil is pushed aside no matter if for good or bad reasons, how costs can change?

I mean: maintaining an aerial network and relevant trolleys is surely expensive, but expensive in what? In natural resources or in worked hours q and hour of vehicle mandatory stops? If it's just in worked hours/maintenance time than in the aforementioned age of scarcity such cost does not matter much.

Few marginal notes:

- at page 77 the graph 5-35 show a curious cost per km change in late 2008, why? Is this due to aging or to purely economical factors like supply chain changes for spare parts, safety norms changes etc?

- the ability to roll and change routes without capital infrastructure set up will be king is another complex beast: on scale that's the reason many researchers try to push naval and very-short-range aviation, from flying taxis to city-to-nearby-city small scale logistics: STOL/VTOL have almost the same industrial cost (beware, industrial not price tag on sale) than modern cars and vans, they cost more in opex but new physical road/rail infra development and regular maintenance/changes cost skyrocketing high capex for an uncertain future since they demand 10+y just to be finished on scale and they need 30-50+y to be paid back enough. At city scale though maintaining a complete coverage of a municipal aerial electrical grid for vehicles especially if we ALSO open if to future other transports (like food distribution logistic till even private cars) might be sustainable. Not in today economy, but in the new world one. In the end actual cities are not sustainable already, we figure out new smaller cities that look like much to small factories with workers inside also for this issue...

- with actual battery chemistry we simply can't sustain a real BEV fleet, we can't produce enough batteries for a new FIRST generation of vehicles nor we know how to recycle them to having enough resources for the next generation in just 5-8 years. BEVs can be done for a small scale of private vehicles, mostly targeting wealthy people + some "glorified golf cart" [1] for specific short range usage...

[1] https://www.vice.com/en/article/y3vny5/glorified-electric-go...

I'm not a transit or budget costing expert, but I understand that trending increase around 2008 to be around warranty ("All vehicles... were off warranty coverage by 2010, explaining why costs rose over the five years").

re: your point on infrastructure, I think my argument would be that anywhere that's dense and stable enough to invest in capital infrastructure would be better served by rail, leaving electric buses like this relegated to distributed suburban areas. I actually think the future is the marriage of ride-hailing and public transit - fixed, schedule transit routes are from the 60's. I'm really excited by some of the experiments that dispatch buses based on app requests [1]

It's a fair point around battery production - to complement your point, it's a well-known issue that Tesla remains primarily battery bottlenecked over anything else. I guess we're in an interesting conflict between what's best for society/environment (electrify asap) vs cities (best possible public transport), but personally I'd put stock in battery production scaling up faster than expected.

https://onlinepubs.trb.org/onlinepubs/Conferences/2019/DRT/K...

Warranty period might be a nice catch, thanks :-)

> [...] anywhere that's dense and stable enough to invest in capital infrastructure would be better served by rail [...]

Honestly I'm against public transport, ad I'm against actual/modern cities: yes, in actual cities we absolutely need public transport, especially in dense EU cities where moving by car is a nightmare, BUT if we see in the world the various "economic environments":

- low density/low demographic areas are in mean underdeveloped and not very nice to live in, they tend to be poor areas for humans;

- high density areas tend to be nightmares where some start fleeing not knowing much where to flee and with density issues that have surpassed the advantage of density economic booster and being dense haven't much room to evolve;

- mid-density areas are middle ground, some are bad places some good ones, so looking at them I see a variety pattern:

- areas dedicated to something in general do see a quick flourishing period than agony;

- areas with a variety of activities and residential tend to prosper better than actual cities until density start to be high (in Riviera's terms).

As a result I see the Riviera model the best we have at today technological level: TLCs and logistics make possible to be "near enough" to have the density economic advantage without being a city, so without the downsides of cities. Surely we can't develop anything with this model, mining, heavy mechanics, metallurgic industries etc can't exists in such models, they need to be districts, but also cities nor other solution work form them and pure districts, like suburbs does not work because they have no variety. We can sustain a failure of a dedicated-to-something district if the rest of the country is resilient and agile enough to evolve, like a riviera, we can't evolve cities, so we are not resilient nor agile with them...

Long-story short in this present time I can't identify something stable enough for land-based networks, nor rails nor roads. Surely what's already build and still in a good shape can be used, but no investments in such infra seems to be a good enough one to my eyes... That's why I'm a partisan of aviation and naval, they still need infra, but such investments are cheaper if we remain at a certain scale so changes can happen with contained losses.

> the company says the buses are "fitted with a new generation of batteries... with high energy density and optimal safety" spread around the roof and rear of the vehicle.

Placing batteries in the floor makes perfect sense for lowering the centre of gravity; why would you want to spread them to the roof (which is where the video shows the fire erupting) ?

The floor of the bus needs to be as low as possible to make it easier for elderly or otherwise disabled people to get on and off.

That's why kneeling busses exist. Are EV busses not equipped with that feature?

Kneeling solves the problem that even a low-floor bus still has a floor height of around 30 cm. Due to a need to maintain sufficient ground clearance and the ability to sweep over regular height kerbstones (up to 20 cm), you can't get much lower than that, whereas conversely you also can't really raise the kerb at regular bus stops that high (i.e. to 30 cm or higher).

Kneeling gets you down to a floor height of about 22 - 24 cm, where level boarding with a 22 cm high kerbstone is just about possible, though still subject to not insignifcant requirements where and how the bus stop exactly can be placed in terms of road geometry.

So the basic gist is that kneeling doesn't absolve you from the requirement of getting the floor of the bus as low as reasonably practicable in the first place, and you need both if you want to achieve anything resembling level boarding at all.

The active suspension for kneeling is actually also used in EV buses to compensate for the high center of gravity. See this video about the Mercedes eCitaro[1] for some visuals and technical information.

[1] https://youtu.be/Om3uVW4lskE?t=327

Having a fire bursting up though the roof of the bus in unfortunate. Having a fire bursting up though the floor is a problem...

everyone wants low floor buses, can't imagine any city buying nowadays bus with extra 20-30cm step, such bus is DOA for mass public transport within city

Low center of gravity is wonderful for following racing lines, drifting, and general handling.

All things busses are not evaluated on.

While accessibility and easy access is a prime selling feature. Thus the world has chosen fewer drifting busses.

in Prague they recently bought 14 new electric Skoda buses (Czech/Turkish production), introduced them with big media attention into operation just this year and after few weeks they are ALL out of operation, because apparently someone designing them thought he can just use regular bus frame and put 3 tons of batteries on the roof without strengthening the frame, but while you find dozens articles about amazing new electric buses being introduced you will have trouble to find articles about them being taken out of operation few weeks later, it's not so catchy for media/politicians as amazing new electric buses

https://zdopravy.cz/mimo-provoz-dpp-musel-odstavit-vsech-14-...

The article you link states that the defect is in the chassis leveling control software and that it will be corrected, it doesn't talk about the frame strength.

So the software isn't configured for the way the mass is distributed on the bus vs a strength failure.

As I said: "As with the previous shutdown, they are not the reason for a fault in the electrical part, but mechanical. They relate to the quality of the body and chassis assembled in Turkey at the Škoda Temsa sister plant."

So no software BS you wanna believe from some cluless MSM sources and DPP propaganda. Truth in the end finds the way...

https://zdopravy.cz/elektrobusy-skody-opet-nejezdi-kvuli-zav...

I was on a bus that caught fire but it was a diesel so it didn't make the papers.

It was one of SF Muni's trolley lines up a ludicrously steep hill, which had been temporarily substituted with diesel coaches for a day because of a detour. The coach was crush-loaded in Chinatown as is typical and it was grinding up the hill at a walking pace with the engine roaring at wide-open throttle when it suddenly exploded in a fireball, probably based on my guesswork a blown gasket followed by ignition of a cloud of oil and fuel.

In my current town we have a fleet of hydrogen fuel cell coaches and their potential explosive nature does not concern me.

Paris is experimenting with a few brands/models of electric buses right now, and it's the same brand/model that caught fire two times. That is quite a lot, but it's only this brand/model that is being suspended, not all electric buses.

I don't know if this brand/model is used elsewhere, but it's a french manufacturer that doesn't have a very long record on making buses. They have made quite some of electric cars, without fires, even though they failed to get customers on them.

I would give them a chance to check and fix: it's still a new tech.

Don't let this make you think this is a general feature of electric buses. There is an electric bus fleet (at least 20 buses, probably more) in Hradec Kralove, CZ for 5+ years now and it has never caught fire - and it's always the best bus ride I ever had, and it's also much better for the city environment (I mean loudness and smell)...

Here's an article (+video) about a non-electric bus that caught fire.

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2021-01-12/cctv-captures-sydney-...

More importantly buses catch on fire in Rome regularly and they are not electric.

All motorized vehicles can catch fire.

I guess you could design trams or electric trains that cannot catch fire. Without fuel and batteries you do not need to have that much flammable things on board.

Plastic trim, seat and seat covers, liners, floors are all flammable, insulation on wiring, lots of stuff. An all-stainless steel interior would be very amusing, though.

While true, what causes the fires? That’s important. Non-electric vehicle fires are most often caused by external causes, not something inherent in the design or during normal operation.

Cooling system breaks down. Gas drips onto hot exhaust.

What varies is the rate of thermal runaway.

Except that it is next to impossible to stop a fully charged battery fire. The most efficient way is to throw the vehicle in a pool of water. But even if you manage this feat, the battery can catch fire again once remove from water.

'Bout the same with a gasoline tank, no?

You can smother a fuel fire, a lithium ion battery fire will continue without oxygen.

With large batteries, once they heat up to the point where they are burning it's tough to cool them back down enough to extinguish the fire.

It's likely enough these buses were in service for close to 5 years without a fire, from 2016:

https://insideevs.com/news/327483/bollore-introduces-12-mete...

Pulling them out of service while they try to figure out the cause of the fires isn't unreasonable.

"By 2023, almost all buses in Oslo [Norway] will be electric":

https://norwaytoday.info/news/by-2023-almost-all-buses-in-os...

The Scandinavians are doing a good job of being ahead of us environmentally. Probably only behind China in electric bus adoption.

They are all made by Chinese companies, at least in Denmark, which makes me sad. Whatever you think of China, and my politics on the subject are obvious, my biggest reservation isn't that they are produced by an authoritarian regime but that Europe's own carmaking industry wasn't tapped. Over the long-term, this weakens our domestic manufacturing capacity and our political negotiation posture, which should be stunningly obvious by the example of the US yet once again the EU has demonstrated optics only for the short-term (see Germany's near-total dependence on Russian gas).

It seems they had a fire recently too: https://youtu.be/ER4s2LLod4s

The most important part would be to know who or how started the fire that is unstoppable after. Sadly we will realize that electric is another hazard in urban warfare and incompatible with organized crime.

If I was a competitor, I would look for ways to sabotage the idea of electric vehicles. If I can think of it, I'm guessing other people are thinking it too. Maybe even doing it, like having buss batteries catch fire.

Electric buses are around in many cities for 100 years, they usually do not catch fire.

Large lithium ion batteries are new, however.

TFL has been running all-electric bus routes in several areas of London since at least 2014 with no issues.

All-electric lithium pack buses are +10 year old tech. Nothing about this is experimental.

This is probably more likely an OEM fuck-up or whoever was contracted by the city of Paris to supply these buses.

In the context of 100 years of electric buses, 10 years is still quite new.

Agreed that this is an error on the manufacturer. It's actually really hard to get design and manufacturing quality to such a high degree to prevent one of the many many many cells from shorting and causing a fire. The battery manufacturers that have this figured out have built a really great wall for themselves, which is probably why we won't see many new large battery manufacturers from here on out.

> In the context of 100 years of electric buses, 10 years is still quite new.

No, If we were talking about the effects of some Tech in Human health I would agree with this sort of cautionary principle.

In the context of electronics, lithium batteries are a 46BN dollar market. Modern manufacturing is producing billions of assemblies and power electronics with well known quality assurance, failure-modes, MTTF, etc.

In the context of modern manufacturing processes and volume 10 years is an eternity.

Most bus builders make what cities will buy and have diesel, natural gas and electric projects.

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