Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Hunter's Campfire New Electric Vehicles Saving Havre Montana Residents Big $'s

Pretty much anything makes financial sense when you throw enough taxpayer money at it. But watch what happens when there are no more free bucks...

The guy in charge of the electric bus fleet in Asheville NC said their electric buses cost $1 million each. In the OP the guy said that a diesel bus costs only $140,000. Asheville bought 5 electric buses. Three of them have quit running. On the two that do work, they can run only 74 miles on a cold winter day before they have to go back to the garage for a lengthy recharge.

I don't know the range of a diesel bus but I can say that my old 18-wheeler got 7 mpg and I had 212 gallons of fuel on board. That truck could run 1,400 miles on a tank full, in summer, or in winter made no difference.

Asheville is Liberal Land. It doesn't mention this in the article I posted, but those greenies bought electric buses [with taxpayer dollars] to fight Climate Change. It is great to fight Climate Change with other people's money.

Ain't that the truth

My 12 year old grand daughter is being taught the evils of CO2 at school. So yesterday we stopped in front of one of our big trees on the place and had a lesson in photosynthesis and learned that that tree like all the plants that every animal and human depend on was built from carbon pulled from the air. I told her Death Valley had flooded twice lately and that the predicted super hurricanes haven't yet showed up.

I think I understand the climate agenda and it is not good for the proletariat.

Climate change is just a redistribution of money.

Big question for me is how will it survive cold weather over time...

Supposedly Having a Tesla in some place like Montana, in the winter, you're driving range is cut by like 80%.

Don't plan on getting very far out of town...

Local bus company here bought 3 buses for around town service...its ran by the county...

They are costing a lot more than a diesel bus to operate, the repairs have been off the charts in expense.
Read something about the break even point will take like 250 years...

The county isn't expected to be buying ANY MORE of them.

and we are talking winter weather in North Carolina... where anyone knows Montana is much worse for cold weather...

anything about electric buses or other vehicles, they only tell everyone, what they want everyone else to think..
Think Baghdad Bob.... Wonder where he went? He's stateside, and head of Marketing for an electric Bus manufacturer.

EV's will work ONLY when electricity is made on board the vehicle , battery vehicles will not work in the long term.

They only work on taxpayers dollars...............

Good to know thanks.

Every passenger EV owner I have spoken to told me they go through brakes and tires faster, which was simply due to their weight, but must be a difference in the effectiveness of regenerative braking between them and something the size of a bus. I read that most electric cranes use it to do all dynamic braking but wasn't aware it was that mature on road going stuff.

“Fighting climate change”. What a joke. The earth is still trying to recover from the last ice age. Glaciers aren’t permanent, permafrost isn’t permanent.
The history of the planet is much warmer, hence all the vast resources of coal, oil and gas.
The periods of cold on the planet that led to various ice ages were due to natural disasters, mainly the asteroid strikes and volcanic eruptions.

Asheville is slap full of some of the dumbest people on the planet.

If it’s possible to fugk something up, Asheville will surely manage it.

Alright, I stepped in it this time. Usually I'm the one marveling at reading comprehension on the 'fire, and as usually happens karma will circle around and bite you in the ass. I missed the part where the busses were subsidized by the VW settlement and not taxpayer funding as most grants are.
I'll own it.
The overriding point was that the busses are "cheaper" , but only because they are heavily, heavily subsidized.
Is the maintenance subsidized? Or do we pay that in taxes? Replacement parts? Electrical bill? How about rising electrical rates we all pay (and will continue to pay as demand and infrastructure demands continue to rise). Will the bus replacement cost be subsidized as well? I gaurantee the replacement cost wasn't factored in to the cost per mile, which is how most non .gov (businesses) have to do it. Also, at present, EV's have little to no secondary market value. Again, not factored in to cost per mile.
Bottom line is the only way the math works is because someone else is footing a vast majority of the bill. Sooner or later, that someone else will undoubtedly be the American taxpayer.
Truly good ideas don't require subsidies.

What I wanna know us who was paying for school buses before this Volkswagen money came along???

A different perspective.....

North Carolina city spent millions on electric buses that don't run....3 out of 5 electric buses that Asheville bought in 2018 are sitting idle.

https://www.foxbusiness.com/politics/north-carolina-city-spent-millions-on-electric-buses-dont-run

Thankfully, the now bankrupt Proterra bus manufacturer sold flawed, early, beta stage battery powered electric buses.

They sold them for outrageous amounts of money due to limited orders and production during the battery powered electric bus introduction to the market.

If it weren't for Proterras flawed early efforts the neigh sayers would have little to use as example for failed battery powered electric school buses.

EV's must sound like the movie from Jaws to you guys.


There coming!

Hahaha!

Electric buses have been around now a lot longer than 7 or 8 years.

In 1940 Seattle had electric buses running 15 routes, with 174 buses operating on 68 miles of two-way parallel overhead lines.


Their electric buses claimed fame for being able to pull the hills in Seattle better than the diesel buses they also used.

The electric bus system there has had its ups and downs..

Ridership reached an all-time high 130 million riders in 1944.

After the war, ridership on the trolleybus system declined as many American families began purchasing automobiles.

Some of the early buses there were converted to operate on both diesel and electric (early hybrid), then back to 100% electric through the fuel shortages of the 1970s.

They've added new electric buses over the years..



But they still run a lot of their older electric buses that have been maintained and rebuilt over the years.

This one was 50 years old when this image was taken.

The bus in the video below was 77 years old when the video was filmed.



So, longevity?
It's already proven.

The big difference today is the introduction of onboard batteries in lieu of dependence of overhead power lines.

So all this resistance to the concept of these electric buses is actually resistance of batteries.

You guys are just afraid of batteries..

Has JeffA posted a pic of his EV, yet?? Just askin’…..

I wouldn't own one of the fkin' things..

I just enjoy making controversial, informative posts that aren't based on Ukraine or our elections.

Ain't nobuddy can say they haven't learned a thing or two from this thread.

This one was fun
New Tesla Pickup

JeffA;
Top of the morning to you sir, I hope that wherever this finds you that it finds you well.

Thanks for the educational reading, there are a lot of layers to this story for sure.

As a kid who grew up in very rural Saskatchewan where I rode the school bus for 2 hours a day on every school day, I can somewhat imagine the rural Montana school districts requirements for a bus.

Without commenting on whether the power grid in that area can deal with the extra consumption, having a vehicle that only gets used for a couple hours, then can go on a charger for a few hours before being needed again makes some logical sense.

We see more and more plug in EVs here in central BC and talking to people who have them, the niche seems to be more for short commutes than say running 5 hours to the coast and back as they just can't do it without stopping for a charge half way.

While it's still early days for all of the battery and electronic components, I will say that Hybrid Toyota rigs are taking over the taxi industry out here and that makes sense - again barring what long term maintenance is going to look like.

For us in the more rural areas with longer trips, a hybrid system that isn't a maintenance nightmare holds some potential from what I can glean.

One of my friends and hunting partners and I often say if we had a hunting rig that'd run on battery all the way back down the mountain it's surely cut down on the annual hunting fuel bill.

As it stands now, both of us usually get a nice Thank You card from the local purveyor of diesel...

Thanks again for the read and all the best.

Dwayne