From NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT
JULY 19, 2021
By Paul Homewood
More than two dozen electric Proterra buses first unveiled by the city of Philadelphia in 2016 are already out of operation, according to a WHYY investigation.
The entire fleet of Proterra buses was removed from the roads by SEPTA, the city’s transit authority, in February 2020 due to both structural and logistical problems—the weight of the powerful battery was cracking the vehicles’ chassis, and the battery life was insufficient for the city’s bus routes. The city raised the issues with Proterra, which failed to adequately address the city’s concerns.
The city paid $24 million for the 25 new Proterra buses, subsidized in part by a $2.6 million federal grant. Philadelphia defended the investment with claims that the electric buses would require less maintenance than standard combustion engine counterparts.
“There’s a lot less moving parts on an electric bus than there is on an internal combustion engine,” SEPTA chief Jeffrey Knueppel said in June 2019. Knueppel retired from the post just months later.
Proterra, which had Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm on its board of directors when Philadelphia pulled the buses off the streets last year, has been highlighted by the Biden administration as a business of the future. President Joe Biden visited the company’s factory in April and pledged in his initial infrastructure package proposal to include federal money for the electric vehicle market. The company has since been touted by top officials including White House climate adviser Gina McCarthy, who in a public meeting asked Proterra’s CEO how the federal government could spur demand for Proterra buses.
The cost of Proterra’s electric buses has gained attention in recent weeks. On a recent trip by Biden to La Crosse, Wis., it was revealed that two buses the city ordered from Proterra for $1.5 million in 2018 have still not been delivered. Over the past five days, Proterra’s stock price has fallen over 25 percent.
Philadelphia’s Proterra buses were first rolled out for the 2016 DNC convention with a promise that the city was “plugging into an emissions free future.”
Granholm was on Proterra’s board from 2017 until earlier this year. It was during that time that both SEPTA and Proterra learned that the heavier buses were cracking, according to the WHYY report.
Philadelphia placed the Proterra buses in areas where it thought they could succeed but quickly learned it was mistaken. Two pilot routes selected in South Philadelphia that were relatively short and flat compared with others in the city were too much for the electric buses.
“Even those routes needed buses to pull around 100 miles each day, while the Proterras were averaging just 30 to 50 miles per charge,” WHYY reporter Ryan Briggs wrote. “Officials also quickly realized there wasn’t room at the ends of either route for charging stations.”
Similar problems have been found in other cities that partnered with Proterra. Duluth, Minn., which, like Philadelphia, waitedthree years for its Proterra buses to be delivered, ultimately pulled its seven buses from service “because their braking systems were struggling on Duluth’s hills, and a software problem was causing them to roll back when accelerating uphill from a standstill,” according to the Duluth Monitor.
Proterra did not respond to a request for comment.
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Sounds like the city didn’t even think about where they would be used before they ordered them. Half of this failure is just poor planning. Of course if anyone thought that far ahead then no-one would order these buses in the first place!
And Jennifer Granholm is in charge of our ENERGY Department. God help us.
The wheels on the bus don’t go round, don’t go round.
When will the “Green New Dealers” realize that WISHING an electric bus or car can replace the internal combustion engine DOES NOT make it true.
Do the buses even have Solar Panels on the roof? I reckon you could fit at least 1kw – that should add another 10 miles to the daytime range
On cloudy days, it’ll just add more weight to haul around, as if the batteries weren’t enough.
There is a wee fly in the ointment with lithium battery tech touted to save us all from the dooming-
Piedmont Lithium price plunges 20pc, goes into trading halt on ‘project block’ threat (msn.com)
You have to actually mine and process the stuff in BIG quantities Greenies.
I know the former manager of a local transit company personally and we discussed the electric bus issues often. The first e-buses they used had a range of about 30 miles, so they installed charging stations at each end of the route so the bus would charge while stopped for passengers. The next generation of buses had ~150 mile range and could run pretty much all day and charge overnite. But one of the major problems was that during winter the range collapsed due to cabin heating. The real numbers showed that maintenance and operating costs were significantly better than their diesel fleet, mostly due to engine service and brake service reduction (the machinery of the e-bus is much simpler). The initial cost of the e-bus was higher. But overall, for the life of the bus, the e-bus was cheaper. Based on this experience, I am not surprised that these struggle in northern climates. My take: e-buses aren’t ready for prime-time, and likely never will be, but hybrid buses are. Adding a diesel generator set addresses both the range and winter heating issues, and the stop and go braking issues, and the running cost issues. The additional cost of the d-g set is offset by a smaller battery.
Electrifying a bus service is a “whole systems” problem that goes beyond the kit that the punter sits in. Shenzhen in China has 16,000 electric buses
“There’s a lot less moving parts”
I guess there aren’t ANY moving parts on these pieces of junk.
Just in Proterra works well in CA. https://freebeacon.com/biden-administration/proterra-bus-fire-prompts-california-agency-to-consider-shelving-electric-bus-fleet/ Melting in the California sun. Just found this article at Gateway Pundit.