1. Attachments are working again! Check out this thread for more details and to report any other bugs.

Featured Electric Buses coming to Vancouver

Discussion in 'Prius, Hybrid, EV and Alt-Fuel News' started by Mendel Leisk, Apr 13, 2018.

  1. Mendel Leisk

    Mendel Leisk Senior Member

    Joined:
    Oct 17, 2010
    54,463
    38,101
    80
    Location:
    Greater Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada
    Vehicle:
    2010 Prius
    Model:
    Touring
    Tideland Prius likes this.
  2. austingreen

    austingreen Senior Member

    Joined:
    Nov 3, 2009
    13,525
    4,057
    0
    Location:
    Austin, TX, USA
    Vehicle:
    2018 Tesla Model 3
    Model:
    N/A
    Here is more information.
    Electric Bus Infrastructure Comes to Vancouver

    4 Busses at about $1M Canadian
    overhead charging $1.2M Canadian

    My guess is they are only charging a small percentage of the pack at each 5 minute break, but drivers take many breaks though out the day. It looks like a good pilot program.

    They expect payback in 6 years versus diesel, my guess is this doesn't include the charging system, but that should last 30 years versus about 12 years for a typical transit bus.

    Electricity in vancouver from BC hydro is relatively cheap, and diesel relatively expensive compared to the US. My guess is between fuel and maintenance the busses could save $0.90/mi CAN in fuel and $0.30/mi CAN in maintenance. That would probably take nearly 6000 miles per month to pay back the extra cost of the busses in 6 years, but they should be able to easily do it in 12 years that busses typically last. As busses age the differencial cost for maintenance should look even better for a bev bus versus a diesel. In the fuel cell bus experiment for the vancouver 2010 winter olympics, maintenance and fuel costs were higher than diesel, but batteries were not good enough for electric busses.
     
    Mendel Leisk likes this.