51–60 of 503 posts
The electric airplane is another myth. There is no known battery technology, or one on the horizon, that can provide a large enough power/weight to make them practical. The investors are getting bilked.
Demonstrated range of over 300 nautical miles. Significantly higher reliability than helicopters previously used for the same task, and much cheaper.
The electric airplane is another myth. There is no known battery technology, or one on the horizon, that can provide a large enough power/weight to make them practical. The investors are getting bilked.
> There is no known battery technology, or one on the horizon,
The planes and batteries are getting there.
Because people are allergic to hybrids and I don't know why "Electric is short range, fuel is expensive, guess I have to pick one" The ideal drivetrain was invented over 20 years ago by Toyota and apparently nobody but me and Honda noticed it!
Isn't waste heat pretty much free by definition?
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This depends a lot on local climate and topography. Seattle has kind of been a bust with them because the hills really reduce the amount of charge, and on top of that the existing bus depots are already full, so switching to electric only would mean having to find and locate space for more bus depots, which is quite difficult.
Hills should never reduce the range, because the energy lost during climbing up is recovered when going downhill. This is one of the great advantages of electric vehicles with batteries, when properly designed. Electric buses with batteries are even more suitable for cities with hills than for cities without hills, because they provide greater energy savings over buses with ICEs. While I have never used buses with ba…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Batteries have won this so hard (if you ignore CNG busses, which have existed forever and are "almost as good as hydrogen could be") - because even when they hadn't won it, you just needed more busses. Is it nice if the bus can do a driver's entire shift without a recharge? Sure! But if it can't, you just design the route so that the driver can switch busses and buy another bus. That means the technology problem is n…
The stop-start nature of city busses makes them a real low hanging fruit for battery electrification, benefiting from instant torque to start and regen to stop and, as you say, fixed known routes within larger fleets. The only nation that seems to have capitalised on this basic fact is China which bootstrapped its EV industry on busses, pulling ahead from 2010 and hitting 90% of global market share for EV busses in 2…
Because people are allergic to hybrids and I don't know why "Electric is short range, fuel is expensive, guess I have to pick one" The ideal drivetrain was invented over 20 years ago by Toyota and apparently nobody but me and Honda noticed it!
Sadly my town of Santa Cruz is going through this right now: https://lookout.co/carmageddon-when-will-santa-cruz-metros-n...
Because people are allergic to hybrids and I don't know why "Electric is short range, fuel is expensive, guess I have to pick one" The ideal drivetrain was invented over 20 years ago by Toyota and apparently nobody but me and Honda noticed it!
Here in SE Michigan, one local transit authority ditched its new hybrid busses and returned to diesel ~15 years ago - because the TCO for the hybrid busses was so much higher that fixing the hole in their budget proved impossible.