On 27 Oct 2022 at 11:57, Lee Hart via EV wrote:
> That's $400,000 per bus! ... You're not going to get many schools to adopt
> them at that price.
Nice work if you can get it, eh? :-\
ICE bus design is pretty much fully amortized, and their manufacture has
more economy of scale. But that's still kind of a nutso price by comparison.
Such a nosebleed price makes E-buses difficult to justify to taxpayers, who
in many areas won't think that the buses are solving a significant problem.
Or at least one of THEIR immediate and personal problems, which is all they
care about.
> Maybe some high school shop class should take on the challenge of
> converting one?
Wouldn't that be great? Healthy for both the schools' budgets and the kids'
education.
Unfortunately, that resounding thud that you just heard was several hundred
school board lawyers across the nation clasping their chests and face-
planting. Can you say "liability"?
> So there could be quite a savings to converting what you already have.
In theory, one would hope so, but maybe not if you contracted for
professional conversion. I assure you that school boards are NOT going to
let kids ride in conversions done in the student auto repair shop class. And
I agree with them.
The problem is finding a decent one. Not that they don't exist - but rather
that school board members don't have the expertise to choose one. Heck,
some of them can barely pick decent textbooks. How can you expect them to
find a competent, experienced, financially secure, and *well-insured* EV
conversion contractor?
There have been entirely too many failures among fleet conversions in the
past - say from around 1970 to 2000 or 2010. I think that there were lots of
reasons for the failures. Among them:
- The vehicles weren't designed to be sufficiently robust.
- The converters over-promised and under-delivered.
- The converters didn't provide the level of support the customers needed,
often not prioritizing service for financial reasons.
- The converters sometimes folded even before the pilot projects finished.
- The drivers weren't trained to operate the conversions properly, often
resented having to drive vehicles unlike the ones they were used to ("What,
it doesn't have air conditioning?!"), and abused them until they failed.
- The customers' maintenance people weren't trained properly, and often
resented having to work on vehicles unlike the ones they were used to
("Sure, I watered the batteries. I sprayed them with this hose."), and
abused them until they failed.
For school bus conversion, I'd probably trust an experienced and relatively
conscientious converter like Solectria. But even if they were still around,
would their conversions be much cheaper than factory EVs? You pay a lot for
that kind of engineering and component reliability when you're accepting
bids in in 2-digit or so quantities.
Still, it would be interesting to see what a competent conversion contractor
could do with something like this.
David Roden, EVDL moderator & general lackey
To reach me, don't reply to this message; I won't get it. Use my
offlist address here : http://evdl.org/help/index.html#supt
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It is not too much to expect that our children will enjoy in their
homes electrical energy too cheap to meter.
-- Lewis Strauss, Atomic Energy Commission, 1954
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