But I'm curious how much this actually affects transport costs. If such a bus is used 12h/day, then even overpaying 100% for the vehicle should get outscaled by labor + maintenance pretty quickly, long before the vehicle is replaced...
But I'm curious how much this actually affects transport costs. If such a bus is used 12h/day, then even overpaying 100% for the vehicle should get outscaled by labor + maintenance pretty quickly, long before the vehicle is replaced...
CO2 wise, electrifying a bus like this should pay off much quicker than replacing individual vehicles, because utilization is higher (not a lot of people drive 12h a day).
Even looking purely at the financials, diesel is fucked.
My takeaway: No reasonable assumption exists that would make operating battery electric busses more expensive than diesel ones.
> On the other hand, he told us that without subsidies, the life cycle costs would be "diesel buses, followed by hybrids, and then with a huge difference, EV buses and then fuel cell buses." He asserts that, as things stand, "neither EV buses nor fuel cell buses would be profitable in terms of life cycle costs without subsidies."
> Tai said, "Relying on subsidies to introduce EV buses and fuel cell buses cannot be considered a healthy business situation," and added, "I strongly hope that technological innovation and price competition will progress throughout the zero-emission bus market."
"EV too cheap to meter ICE dead" is just hype. The realoty is it's not much more than another subsidy milking, yet. Cleaner air in the city is nice, though.The electric variant is clearly significantly cheaper to operate (like my linked source shows) even taking charging infrastructure and maintenance into account.
Battery electric busses becoming CAPEX competitive with diesel ones is also just a matter of time in my view (case in point: singapore already gets those for less than the US currently pays for diesel ones).
> Even looking purely at the financials, diesel is fucked.
> My takeaway: No reasonable assumption exists that would make operating battery electric busses more expensive than diesel ones.
The problem here is that these were your initial opinions that aren't supported by the reality. Diesel is fucked, long term, and that's good, but that's also long term future, not the reality right now like you were arguing. The matter of time is sometimes the matter.From the linked analysis you will also find that the higher price example for diesel bus in the article ($980k) is already more expensive than a typical BEV alternative and likely a net drain on the operator (by comparison) within the first year.