infrastructure and the $0.50 per gallon tax credit, at least two manufacturers will soon offer options to school bus customers. Collins announced last month it is partnering with BAF to bring to market the first Type A CNG by this spring. Te industry also awaits a CNG Type A from Starcraft Bus.
ELECTRICITY IN THE AIR At the NAPT Summit in late October, Trans Tech Bus unveiled
the first fully electric Type school bus, the futuristic-looking eTrans built on a Newton chassis supplied by Smith Electric, which is expected to go into production by the third or fourth quarter of this year. First reported in the October 2011 edition of School Transportation News, the new eTrans is projected to have a range of up to 130 miles before the bus needs recharging. Dan Daniels, president of Trans Tech Bus, said at NAPT that the zero-emissions eTrans can be fully recharged in six to eight hours during nighttime, off-peak hours in time for stop-and-go route service the next day. “It’s a perfect application for an electric vehicle,” Daniels added. One of the most frequently mentioned advantages of electric
vehicles is fuel savings. At cents on the dollar, electricity can potentially save hundreds if not thousands a year per school bus depending on the duty cycle. Data from Azure Dynamics, which provides the battery technology for the Type A Collins NexBus hybrid, compared its all-electric TransitConnect utility van with a similar-sized Ford E-250 van. Tom Lincoln, director of sales for Azure’s southeast region,
explained that the 28kw-hour electric battery range is 60 to 80 miles depending on driving conditions, which means the vehicle can be filled up for less than $2 a day. Meanwhile, the E-250 gets approximately 15 miles per gallon of gasoline. “You’ve just offset four to five gallons of gasoline,” Lincoln
added. “Per day you’re offsetting at least $13 in operating costs with an electric versus a gasoline vehicle.” Further cost savings are being promised via regenerative
braking to store energy during deceleration for consumption at acceleration. Trans Tech’s Daniels said this will help school bus operators save on brakes, as they can last three times longer than
in a diesel-powered bus. In fact, he said the eTrans can reduce maintenance service costs by up to 80 percent because the bus does not consume oil or transmission fluid. Tere are also no oil or air filters to replace. As with light passenger vehicles, however, there are battery-life
concerns. Doswell said Collins initially encountered challenges with battery life when it launched the NexBus hybrid-electric Type A in 2009, but soon thereafter Azure Dynamics opted to move from a nickel-metal hydride to lithion-ion battery, the first battery pack fully manufactured and assembled domestically. Doswell said the result is that customers are seeing longer battery life. While there is still more work to be done, the general direction is a positive one. But it will take time. Te only small bus manufacturer currently without an
available alt-fuel option is IC Bus. Te subsidiary of Navistar is also the newest Type A OEM, having unveiled a prototype of its AE Series for the school bus market at the 2010 NAPT Summit in Portland, Ore., and again displaying the industry’s first fully integrated Type A body and chassis at NAPT in October. It is a similar but smaller version of the company’s Type C conventional, and the wheelchair lift-equipped bus is being marketed as a “one- stop shop” for sales, parts and service through the IC Bus dealer channel. Te AE Series also features easier
service access to the
company’s proprietary MaxxForce 7 diesel engine via a full-tilt hood as well as parts that are similar to the CE Series. It’s more than conventional wisdom that IC Bus could also scale its current CE Series hybrid-electric drive train to the AE Series. “We see this as a long-term possibility as battery technology
develops and system costs become more manageable,” a company spokesperson told STN. “However, right now our focus is releasing the AE Series into the market in the spring of 2012 with diesel engines.” With that launch expected to be in May, the rep added that
the alternative-fuels market is growing and will continue to as it is driven by supplemental funding and/or tax credits. IC Bus is continuing to explore “the appropriate ways to approach this in the Type A market.”
“The savings are real, the benefits of the technology are real. The trouble is right now the cost to play the game is high.”
— Tom Lincoln, Azure Dynamics, on reli ability and price of electric and hybrid
Type A school buses
The new Thomas propane Minotour.
www.stnonline.com 35
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