This electric school bus has a range of up to 300 miles
This electric school bus has a range of up to 300 miles
The Type-D school bus uses a 387 kWh lithium iron phosphate battery.
Ideally, rezoning and infrastructure changes would reduce the need for school buses. We don't have the time though, so this is a win. Hopefully production can ramp up and governments can create incentives for schools to buy these instead of dead dino powered buses.
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7% at the end of a ~300mi roundtrip rural run is really cutting it close 😳 although if the journey is mostly flat I think it's OK, as long as there's enough range to go via any diversion if the road is blocked.
They could definitely get a bigger battery onto that roof, the main expense there probably would be customising the aircon to fit around a roof battery pack instead of buying one off the shelf
The electric buses here all have roof mounted batteries and they last pretty long - the chinese Yutongs are out all day with the heating on, but our domestic built ones seem to last only 3/4 of the day, and after that they vanish with the old diesel ones appearing on routes until the night
Keep long routes diesel or gas for now and wait for battery tech to improve. Even if 70% of buses are moved to electric, it is still a big chunk of emissions that are cut.
Or maybe just put a charging point in at thge driver's lunchtime rest stop
Lunchtime rest stop?
Where I'm from bus drivers drive from 7am - 9am and then go home and come back for 3:30pm - 5:30pm.
They essentially get the entire work day off. Not just lunch.
You can offset some loss by putting solar panels on the roof. However you have to balance it properly because people forget that these things weigh 45lbs each and you need to factor the additional weight into equation.
Solar would barely make a dent with the power consumption of a bus
It would. Not if you use the full 300 mile range twice a day, but many school buses are used for two 25 mile trips per weekday and parked in the sun the rest of the day plus weekends. Cover the roof in high efficiency panels and you can get significant range.
I wouldn’t say barely. It depends on the rating of the panels and the amount of weight they have. Also if we are just using them to offset energy I don’t see why it would be an issue if you’re accounting for the additional weight and resources used by adding them to this electrical system. If you could offset the loss of operating something small on the vehicle with that small amount of production it would seem worth it as long as it doesn’t increase costs or otherwise put strain on the vehicle’s travel range.