3 ms·

> got eaten up by the hills Maybe the busses sucked, but this doesn’t make sense as a general point against electric: hills are where EVs shine most. Through r

> got eaten up by the hills Maybe the busses sucked, but this doesn’t make sense as a general point against electric: hills are where EVs shine most. Through regen you can get back most of the energy you spent getting up the hill. You probably need a big capacitor though, or a very big battery with good cooling. So I can imagine cheap-o electric buses would have issues. I would love to see the math on what kind of capacitor/battery you would need to capture 1000 ft of elevation loss by a city bus.

bobthepanda 7y ago
The issue is not torque or power, the issue is the range, particularly going uphill consistently. Regen is not 100% efficient, the route seems to be 1000 ft of gain or loss in one direction, and the Albuquerque buses were sold on the explicit promise that they could last pretty much a full day without charging, which turned out to be false. If you can't run the bus back and forth a full day without charging, this requires more buses to run the same service as a diesel fleet, which makes it a very expensive CapEx item because sourcing decently located space to store and maintain buses is not cheap, nor is maintaining all those extra buses.