Most of us preferred Blue Birds to Thomas buses. My relatively-new Thomas bus periodically failed inspection and they had me drive a much older Blue Bird. Our training buses were thirty year-old Blue Birds.
When I searched for Blue Bird hybrid bus I only found reports of a full electric:
Quote:
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Blue Bird’s all-new Type C bus features up to 100 miles of electric range, with a full charge time of under 8 hours by utilizing a Type 2 charger and a battery capacity of 150kWh.
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https://www.blue-bird.com/about-us/p...apt-conference
This says it would cost $350,000.
I cannot find any figures for street prices for school buses. Fifteen years ago I understood that they cost $100,000. I found an article about some unemployed ski instructor complaining that the district wanted to spend $40,000 extra for a bus with wifi (despite being corrected repeatedly.
They said it actually cost $1,800, plus $110 a month. So, it would absolutely cost an extra $40,000--over twenty-nine years.
They said the district wanted to purchase two buses for an average of $110,000, but they did not really specify features.
I do not think that any of my routes exceeded a hundred miles a day and they usually sat from 0830 to 1300, so a sixty-mile range should have been more than adequate.