Prevost developing an electric coach.

Thermoguy wrote:

Reisender wrote:

valhalla360 wrote:
Article isn't clear. The picture is a tour bus but the writeup implies transit bus.

Transit can work because with regenerative braking and rarely exceeding 40mph, efficiency is far better than a brick cruising at a steady 70mph.

No, savings from policing accidents is no where close to enough to justify free rides. Where you can justify is if you can avoid road widening and similar costs...but diesel busses do just as well at this.

Ok. But busses with tail pipes are being banned from more and more small towns and cities in Europe. People just don’t want tail pipes in their towns. We have see this first hand the hard way. :). . There is a market for tour busses without tail pipes.

The reason the electric bus is better than a diesel bus is that a bus stops a lot. An electric bus uses no energy when it is stopped, a diesel bus keeps running. In addition, diesel buses have to be taken out of service to fuel up, an electric bus does not. What they are doing is using inductive charging to charge the bus and keep it running. A typical bus route a bus has multiple locations where it has a planned stop for 15-30 minutes or maybe more, that is where they put inductive charge pads where the bus stops, this is where the bus recharges for the next part of the route. It is proving to be a great use of EV technology.

Exactly, a transit bus rarely goes over 45mph, so wind resistance is negligible. They spend upwards of 50% of the route time either stopped or braking (which activates the regenerative braking).

In theory, you can do inductive charging pads but they are very inefficient compared to plugging in and very expensive to install and maintain. With an average speed of maybe 20mph, a 200mile range will cover an 8hr shift with a decent margin for error. That's pretty reasonable for a transit bus. For a tour bus (which diesel pusher MHs are based on), daily drives of 300-600miles are pretty common, so it's the rare tour company that would be happy with a 250mile range.

As far as tailpipe emissions...that's mostly political showmanship. If you replace 40 modern passenger cars with modern emission systems with a 1960's vintage smog belching bus, the bus is still going to be far less polluting. The big difference is it's easy for the politicians to mandate transit bus specs...a lot harder to mandate personal vehicles because the population feels it directly in the wallet.