This week’s horror story involving Proterra and the $500,000-plus per unit buses it makes comes out of Duluth, Minnesota and the Minneapolis/St. Paul metro area in the same state. Local officials in both areas, being almost entirely Democrats and feverishly anxious to prove they are “doing something” to address the all-seeing, all-knowing, all-powerful wizard behind the curtain we refer to as “climate change,” adopted plans over the last 8 years to transform their city bus fleets from diesel to electric.
Cool. Surely Unicorns and Sugar Plum Fairies would be shortly heading their way, and the officials making the decisions would all be able to signal their virtue to St. Peter when their time at the Pearly Gates arrives. Assuming they actually believe in St. Peter or the Pearly Gates, of course.
But, as seems to be inevitably the case wherever and whenever the EV bus experiment is adopted, a funny thing happened on the way to leftist social planner Utopia: The buses didn’t actually work as advertised and have proved incapable of displacing the evil, ageing diesel fleets.
Man, who could have seen that one coming?
Here’s an excerpt from the story at the Western Journal:
Virtue-signaling liberalism is fighting another losing battle with reality.
On Wednesday, the Minnesota-focused news outlet MinnPost reported that several of the state's largest cities have encountered significant obstacles in their quest to achieve planet-friendly public transit.
Frigid temperatures and a myriad of other problems have plagued Duluth and the Twin Cities of Minneapolis and St. Paul during their transition to zero-emission buses.
In subzero conditions -- a staple of Minnesota winters -- electric buses operate at only a fraction of their supposed 150-mile capacity.
Drew Kerr, spokesman for Twin Cities Metro Transit, explained that charged buses travel far shorter distances than manufacturers advertised.
“Using garage chargers alone, electric buses can remain in service for 70 to 75 miles before needing to return to the garage; with on-route chargers, electric buses were scheduled to be in service for up to 90 miles before returning to the garage,” Kerr said.
Duluth spokesman Dave Clark noted that the city has experienced significant problems with charging stations.
“They would fail. They would not perform. They would experience malfunctions, glitches. They were extremely problematic right out of the gate,” Clark said.
Furthermore, Duluth's electric bus fleet has provided inadequate comfort by failing to keep riders warm in winter.
Meanwhile, the Twin Cities' fleet has proven comparatively unreliable. In Minneapolis-St. Paul, electric buses have broken down at twice the rate of traditional diesel-powered buses.
All of this leaves the general impression that electric buses lack efficiency and do not meet riders' needs.
And so we have yet more Democrat-run cities whose residents are now being forced to fund not one, but two bus fleets: The reliable fleet powered by diesel that arrives on time and carries them to their desired destinations, and the unreliable boondoggle EV fleet that is never likely to carry them anywhere, at least not without hundreds of millions more dollars in additional investments.
But that is all dependent, of course, on the cities’ ability to find and engage with a new vendor to replace the bankrupt Proterra.
You just cannot make this stuff up, folks. Don’t even try.
That is all.
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