Biden Spent $1 Billion To Get Schools Electric Buses. This Michigan District Says Theirs Hardly Work

[rangerrebew]

Biden Spent $1 Billion To Get Schools Electric Buses. This Michigan District Says Theirs Hardly Work.
A Proterra electric bus in service in Philadelphia in 2019 / YouTube Screenshot
Collin Anderson
May 24, 2023

Michigan's fourth-largest school district is having "significant" performance issues with its expensive electric buses, issues that come after the Biden administration spent $1 billion to "transform America's school bus fleet" with electric models.
 
During an April 19 presentation to the Ann Arbor Public Schools Board of Education, the district's environmental sustainability director, Emile Lauzzana, highlighted a number of issues with the district's electric bus fleet. Those buses, Lauzzana said, have "a lot of downtime and performance issues" and aren't "fully on the road," despite the fact that they are "approximately five times more expensive than regular buses." The infrastructure upgrades required to use the buses, meanwhile, were "originally estimated to be only about $50,000" but "ended up being more like $200,000," according to Lauzzana. "I have a number of colleagues in different states who are facing similar challenges," the district official lamented. "For the school bus market, it's been challenging for us."

https://freebeacon.com/biden-administration/biden-spent-1-billion-to-get-schools-electric-buses-this-michigan-district-says-theirs-hardly-work/

[SZonian]

No matter, the $$ went to whom it was supposed to, a "minor" inconvenience for the schools and students.   

[Kamaji]

[Kamaji]

The stupid thing with all of these fleet failures is that, if properly structured, they could be done in such a way that the electric vehicle makers are willing to give a significant discount on the pricing in order to be able to collect long-term data on performance to be used to improve the products.  Development testing is great, but there is nothing quite like having hundreds of your products put through real-world testing.

And, to be perfectly honest, given the nature of the routes driven by many fleet vehicles, they are probably the class of vehicles that would be most likely to benefit from electrification in an economically rational way.