Electric truck - tow vehicle of future ?

John & Angela wrote:
There are a lot of North American cities switching to electric only buses. The bean counters must be making sense of it. There would be no political reason to do it. Bus riders don't care how the bus is powered.

Hybrid is getting a lot of real life use but outside demonstration units and tiny buses used in central areas of European cities, I haven't seen much pure electric.

Hybrid makes a lot of sense. A transit bus is a perfect use of hybrid. They typically operate on congested signalized corridors and with stops, rarely go more than 1/4 mile between stops. Average speeds of 20-30mph are common.

A standard diesel bus needs 250-300hp to get halfway decent acceleration which is a big deal given the use case and that engine is operating in a wide RPM range during acceleration and deceleration resulting in significant time spent outside the engines ideal power output range.

With a hybrid, a 75-100hp engine would be plenty to maintain the average speed and you can set it to run at a constant power output near it's peak efficiency. The only downside is if you need to move the bus to a new city and have to travel 50-100 miles on freeways. With only 75hp, top speed is probably going to be around 45-50mph unless the batteries give it a boost (which means limited range) or you oversize the engine which negates a lot of the benefits of hybrid. I haven't heard of anyone doing this but you could make a transport battery pack that could be loaded in the bus if you need to do a long distance move. It could simply be a modular set of batteries that are placed on the floor of the bus with quick connect wiring and a port to connect to the hybrid battery pack.