Buses aren’t insulated.
Why. I mean if the weather is usually fine sure but if you’re living on the arctic circle they better be insulated.
3 kids in a full size bus near the end of its rural route in sub-zero conditions. Buses aren’t insulated. An EV failure is going to be a problem. Considering how cheap those diesel heaters are it would be a liability concern to not have them.
barsoap@lemm.ee 9 months ago
frezik@midwest.social 9 months ago
www.nrel.gov/docs/fy14osti/60068.pdf
“Similarly to route duration, doubling the route distance to reflect daily operating distances, it is found that on average school buses travel 73.46 miles, with a 99.7% cutoff on driving distance of 154.46 miles.”
Keep in mind, that’s double distance to cover both before and after school; they have a pause in the middle of the day to charge up again. There are battery buses on the market right now that do 155 miles. It also takes about an order of magnitude more power to run a motor for an EV than it does to run the heaters. If you get stuck in the snow in an EV at 50% charge, you can likely make it there through the night with the heater running.
The cold is a complete non-issue for this use case.