Why The US Trails China In Electric Buses

around the world electric vehicles are gaining momentum and there's no place where the Eevee revolution has taken hold like China the world's largest car market is leading the charge in the adoption of zero emission vehicles largely due to government subsidies and mandates and while most of the attention on mitigating pollution is directed at passenger cars the Chinese have prioritized another area that will have a bigger impact buses in play globally 99% of which were delivered in China we estimate that approximately 89% of all electric buses delivered globally will be delivered in a pack by 2025 to the credit of the Chinese government they realized very early on that this transition globally was going to take place China very strategically looked at markets like urban cars and urban buses and they have been spending billions of dollars to move them off of oil and if you look at the impact that that's had on China they have reduced their daily oil consumption by over 200 thousand barrels of crude oil buses consume considerably more fuel than the average car making the transition to electric significant in reducing consumption of fossil fuels buses are responsible in many cities for the majority of specific pollutants and tailpipe emissions that's because they drive a lot of miles per year and they're very fuel inefficient as diesel applications the more cars they could take off the streets in China but more importantly more of the diesel buses they could take off the streets would help air quality in China in the u.s. however the adoption of zero emission buses is happening at a much slower pace interact analysis says the US had just 300 buses delivered in 2018 compared to the 78,000 in China I think our biggest obstacle here in the u.s. is that we're slow to adopt to new ideas and we get very comfortable in just the status quo [Music] the company that delivered the majority of US buses last year is Bay area-based Proterra we're coming up on a hundred customers and we did 25 deployments alone in 2018 so we have buses at Yosemite we have buses in New York City we have them in Seattle we have them in Dallas Texas we also have them in a lot of small fleets like Missoula Montana so we went through the effort of designing a vehicle from scratch to be an electric vehicle and that meant rethinking a lot of things that you that you do in a bus where the motors gonna be located where you'd put the energy storage but ultimately that gets you to a much higher performance design and that's why our vehicles have a better handling characteristic and longer range than the previous attempts of electric buses before joining Proterra as CEO ryan papa got his start working at Tesla companies like Tesla are doing a phenomenal job in terms of changing this market and changing mentalities around passenger cars and so the opportunity we have a company like Proterra is to take state-of-the-art evie technology and make it accessible to every single rider in a city compared to diesel buses battery electric is far more efficient and can result in significant cost savings for transit agencies our buses use around two kilowatt hours of electricity per mile if you take the average price of electricity in the u.s. that's about 10 cents a kilowatt hour so you need 20 cents of electricity to move our bus one mile diesel buses they only get four miles to the gallon and that's on a good day so if you take today's diesel prices in California you're probably burning 80 cents of diesel fuel per mile that you drive while adoption if battery electric buses has been slow state mandates are starting to expedite that process New York City the largest transit agency in the US has plans to take its fleet all-electric by 2040 and California has taken an aggressive stance in reducing vehicle emissions requiring all new buses to be zero emissions starting in 2029 as of December of 2018 the California Air Resources Board voted 12 zero that the entire bus fleet of California's going zero emission when that happened it was a pretty bold statement but my own personal belief is that transit operators everywhere are going to move in that direction much faster San Jose Airport recently converted a portion of their shuttle fleet to port area electric buses San Jose Airport as a microcosm it's an example of what we think the entire bus industry could look ten years from now the major thing in deciding to get electric buses was really the initiative that our city has and our mayor has for sustainability and going green right now we're in a bit of a transition phase where we have our current CNG fleet mixed with our electric fleet but here very quickly will slowly phase out our CNG fleet these vehicles are part of the city of San Jose's long term sustainability plan they have a path to run on 100% carbon free electricity so they are zero mission today to the local community and their future is to be a zero carbon transportation system as well north of Los Angeles Antelope Valley Transit Authority is on track to be the first all-electric Metro fleet in the u.s. their buses are made by Chinese company BYD by the end of this year we'll have our local transit fleet will be electric the only diesel buses will be left at a 30 or so commuter vehicles that take our customers down to LA to power these buses Antelope Valley's turning to solar power we have enough solar capacity on hand now the wrong the maintenance shop administration building basically everything by charging the buses so we've been in negotiations with a couple different solar providers to provide the rest of solar we need to be 100% off-grid and a fairly sizable battery pack so we can also charge at night Antelope Valley says solar and battery power are more reliable than fossil fuel or charging the buses on the traditional power grid any fuel type is subject to interruption a few years back there was an earthquake that broke the natural gas lines that ran into Oxnard these our fuel lines can be cut off a refinery explosion can shut off fuel supplies but I feel really strongly there was solar battery storage we're a lot more resilience than any other creek or fuel type currently running in North America since converting their buses to battery electric Antelope Valley has seen a few benefits we avoided 1 million three hundred thousand tons of greenhouse gas emissions we avoided two hundred eighty five thousand gallons of diesel fuel would save us about $500,000 and I would just would third the fleet and a million miles those numbers extrapolated out to 12 years equals 65 million dollars of savings so it's not only it's a good for the environment but it makes economic sense being a pioneer for an all electric fleet Antelope Valley has garnered the interest of other municipal agencies evaluating the technology for themselves the response has been overwhelming and we we probably get five six requests a month for tours of the facility sholde show people our infrastructure is working our charging systems are working and we're living proof that it works that saves money it's and actually the vehicles are more reliable than our legacy fleet of diesel hybrid vehicles but there is one area where questions remain the charging infrastructure strategically all around the valley we've gotten into our charters that wirelessly charge the buses over an air gap so when the bus pulls into the Transit Center for its normal ten-minute layover while the customers get on and off it's actually picking up a brief charge - and by doing that seven or eight times a day we add 120 miles of range BYD the company that makes Antelope Valley's buses has a manufacturing plant in nearby Lancaster California we've been here about six years and we're producing roughly around seven different models of electric buses that are earmarked for use in the United States and transit agencies universities large employer campuses and airports though it originally started as a battery company boo ideas now the world's largest TV manufacturer we're not only in China we're in the UK we're in South America we're in Central America we're in Mexico we're in the Caribbean we're in Canada so again it being a global problem BYD wants to be part of the global solution aside from the environmental benefits electric buses are also less prone to maintenance issues and are cleaner to work on it's fun to take these out show the maintenance people and they're often very surprised at how simple and elegant the design is they're used to a massive diesel engine that's dirty and it's incredibly complicated and these vehicles are very very simple to operate in maintain the way Diesel's are able to stay on the road right now is they have particular traps the trap the suit basically the diesel exhaust produces and you get the soot out it becomes a hazardous material has to be disposed of through the EPA has this material disposal process it's also very expensive if you're sending it a century to a landfill meant for hazardous materials it's actually got 30% less moving parts my jobs a lot easier as far as you know troubleshooting and figuring out what things may be wrong at the time while China may be in the lead in number of buses in circulation some believe that the u.s. still excels from a technology standpoint this Renaissance of manufacturing design and engineering that's happening in the electric vehicle space a lot of the best work is being done in the United States we want to make sure that we have a competitive advantage in the world as the world transitions to cleaner quieter electric vehicles we will never catch him just from population and demand for vehicles but I think technologically were there and I think that we're gonna continue to you know improve to where we might be ahead of them fueling the fact that US is growing is great science at birth and 2083 yeah we estimated to be about 2000 roughly about 2000 electric buses and events annually by 2025 within America and as more electric buses make their way into US public transit systems the companies making the vehicle say their technology can be used far beyond city buses school buses should be coming right on top of that we have a partnership for Coach buses and we're also partnering with a UK manufacturer for double-decker electric buses and eventually we're going to see these into trucks for delivery locally things like garbage trucks as well we think pretty much every heavy-duty vehicle that you see out there and our cities and towns is going to be electric at some point in the near future it's really a no-brainer the economics are there the benefit ecologically and environmentally are there and I think what China has done in showing leadership to the world funding and pushing forward their own fleets to get green and clean in the United States we've got probably five companies now that are doing electric buses and virtually every automakers introducing an electric vehicle so I think the change is here for good [Music] you

Channel: CNBC

Views: 1,130,197

Keywords: CNBC, business, news, finance stock, stock market, news channel, news station, breaking news, us news, world news, cable, cable news, finance news, money, money tips, financial news, Stock market news, stocks, china vs. us, american public transportation, why the us has no high speed rail, public transit america, public infastructure america, what america fails at, china vs america, electric buses, electic vehicles china, electric vehicles usa

Id: 5wWJW4WJzd0

Length: 12min 7sec (727 seconds)

Published: Tue Sep 24 2019

Reddit Comments

[u/[deleted]]

China haters: reeeeeeeeeeee

[u/wakeup2019]

New Electric buses introduced in 2018:

USA: 300

China: 78,000

Any questions? 😀

[u/wavemists]

ya electric bus vs the crap we got now for diesels is a win i think the maintenance savings alone save more money then fuel saving, so much maintenance with the newer system (DEF etc etc etc , a gazilion sensors and crap for the whole thing + hybrid) ya might has well have 1 Mechanic per bus.

also byd batteries are better , less dense but they can't explode like protera/tesla etc

[u/Sinopremacy]

"I think our problem here in the US is that we're slow to adopt to new ideas"

China so much faster now.