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Originally Posted by Bigtime
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Article actually comments that because of federal grants they could have only afforded about 80-90 CNG buses. Chose electric to get the grant, and a Larger fleet.
But what I'm surprised it doesn't mention is the lower overall maintenance cost, and the longer vehicle life expectancy, which should return operational savings.
There are some Problems with deploying buses like these wide, because some routes are longer than 4 hours or however long these batteries will last in the winter (just intuitively comparing it to my EVs, should would do about 4 hours of city driving in the coldest weather, might be very different) , and that while house do have existing grid infrastructure for charging about 1 car at a time. The Bus Barns probably do not have the grid infrastructure to support charging dozens to hundreds of buses at a time per location. But I'm guessing those are very manageable problems for less then 10% of the fleet. It also may be that by owning these buses their route planning and maintenance crews can get some real world experience with all of those issues.