Albuquerque electric bus problems
 

Saw on the local news that albuquerque public transportation is being accused of wasting hundreds of thousands if not millions of dollars on unreliable breakdown prone electric busses.
I'm waiting for a link to appear, I saw it on the local news last night, so it's still pretty fresh.
So far all the links are all older and full of rainbows and unicorns taking about how wonderful they will be.

Probably not an isolated case. I just assume most anything the government is spending my money on is wasted.

What part seems to be more failure-prone on them? Does the failure rate eventually have some relation to weather conditions? I've never been in Albuquerque or anywhere else in the U.S.A., but have always heard about New Mexico and Arizona having extreme weather conditions, and probably the low humidity in the air and the high temperatures become an issue due to the cooling of those modern Lithium battery packs fitted to modern EVs in general.

BTW some Chinese electric buses had been tested in my hometown, but probably won't be adopted by local bus operators so soon due to the local power grid being quite prone to weather-related failure :turtle:

Major problem with the hybrid buses in London. The electric side is unreliable and prone to breaking down, thus leaving the diesels to run full time. Of course, the diesels were never designed to work that way and are pumping out more crap than the old buses did as the engines run flat out powering them.

Are them using a serial hybrid setup? I'm only used to Volvo hybrid buses with their parallel hybrid setup.

Now why would they do that? Every diesel I've ever seen puts out crap when it's accelerating, not so much when it's at steady load. Follow a semi as it downshifts going up a hill, for instance.

Sonce this is coming out in the middle of winter I'm thinking it's probably not a excessive heat related problem.
The TV news didn't say what parts were breaking down.

This link explains some of the issues.

https://www.abqjournal.com/1117548/a...-problems.html

JJ

should have gone with hydraulic
just hook up a large gearotor pump to the second back axle and add an accumulator

I could probably retrofit a bus myself for about 15,000

also amazing efficient on recovery of momentum with hydraulic
on the order of 92 to 98 %

Because they were never designed or optimised to function as the sole power units.

We have similar issues with reno city transit. Hybrids run diesel only and the full electrics shut down in the most inopportune places. Seems to be how we run them, full on or full brake. When they switched them to intercity they broke slightly less often.

Alright so it's basically a cluster.

The company can't build them fast enough.
Then they have to be shipped to PA for some sort of federal government inspection so the city can be reimbursed by the fed.
Some of the busses are already dead, their build in chargers have already failed.
The axles are leaking oil.
An inspector refused to certify the charging systems because the contract was for high end, high $ chargers and the busses manufactured all have cheap Chinese chargers.
The batteries were supposed to go for 275 miles between chargings, they only last 200 or less, buss roughs were designed around this 275mi range.

What are the chances they go bankrupt, take the money and run?
Cause that's the way it sounds like it will go.

None of this says electric buses won't work.
The biggest changes need to be done to the people.
You can't buy a bus with a absolute max 275 mile range and expect to get 275 miles out of it every day for years.
You can use cheap Chinese high power electronics.

When I used to drive paratransit we had LN2 fuel that was supposed to go 125 miles but you generally only reliably went 50. Many of my days were 3 to 5 refuel s.

The full electrics are only parked at recharge for 15 minutes every 2 hours of run. See anything off here? Reno isn't a flat and level town either.