battery powered buses

[Joel N. Weber II]

When are we going to start seeing transit buses and school buses powered by the same type of battery system a Tesla Roadster runs on? I get the impression that if you can charge the bus at night and for an hour or two at mid-day, most transit and school buses need an awful lot less than the Roadster's 240 mile range.

 

[DET63]

I would think that for school buses that have 2 or 3 30- to 60-minute runs a day, a battery-powered arrangement might be practical. For public-transit buses that might be on the road for 6-8 hours a day in stop-and-go traffic, a battery-powered arrangement might be far less practical.

Another issue for school buses is that they are also used for athletic and field trips. A bus that had to be recharged every day at the end of, let's say, 2 20-mile trips might not be available to carry the high-school football team that same day on its 40-mile trip to the big away game.