Electric Vehicles - better a century late than never...
The year is 1907. The city is London where a fleet
of 20 electric powered
buses glides silently
between the horse-drawn past and the noisy, dirty
and unreliable future. Shortly thereafter, they
disappeared despite being popular with passengers,
more reliable and cost effective than motor buses.
Why?
Yet a full century later, remarkably similar buses
using similar "battery swap" technology from
EVAmerica and others are
just beginning to be used in American cities such
as Chattanooga and
Santa Barbara.
As this week's Economist points
out, buses could
have been predominantly be electric if the
Electrobus Company had not been managed with
WorldCom-like ethics complete with a failed IPO,
payments to fake patent holders and insider
dealing.
Why now? Electric buses require less energy because
it is generated in more efficient plants than
gasoline or diesel motors. Electric buses have always
had lower maintenance costs because they don't have
conventional transmissions and braking is electric.
But new battery technology is now giving electric
buses greater range than the 40 miles achieved by
Electrobus in 1907
Trolley bus fleets powered by overhead wires are also
growing once again with San Francisco's MUNI
operating a
fleet of 333 mostly new Czech-built buses city
wide, up from 270 just a few years ago. This is
part of MUNI's goal to achieve zero emissions by
2020.
