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Comment by ZeroGravitas | Hacker News Reader

The stop-start nature of city busses makes them a real low hanging fruit for battery electrification, benefiting from instant torque to start and regen to stop and, as you say, fixed known routes within larger fleets.

The only nation that seems to have capitalised on this basic fact is China which bootstrapped its EV industry on busses, pulling ahead from 2010 and hitting 90% of global market share for EV busses in 2020, and now a big exporter.

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For the same reason the electric mail trucks are a good idea. You can probably expect UPS and FedEx to start replacing their fleets over time as the existing vehicles age out, now that all electric vans are starting to become available.

DHL is already using many electric vans.

Where I live a parcel delivery round can be hundreds of miles, so let's not over generalise

But most deliveries take place in cities and in suburban areas, just because more people live there.

That sounds like a pretty rural area. Your postal office is likely running personal vehicles for mail service.

I'd say 95% of Amazon delivery vehicles I see in NYC are the electric type. Amazon are known to be really concerned with the bottom-line efficiency, so I suppose it must make clear economic sense.

(At least in King County Metro) the newer diesel-electric buses are series hybrids that use electric motors for traction, and diesel generators to power a small battery. So the low hanging fruit of electric traction was already “picked”. You can look up the bus model online - New Flyer XDE class

Where I live the buses often come from surrounding towns up to 50 miles away. With the out and back trip we have many many swaps to manage

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