Designed by Proterra, this bus can go 30 to 40 miles at 11 to 13 miles per hour before it needs a recharge, which it gets by passing under a contact arm at a bus stop or a bus yard.
The batteries can be recharged in under 10 minutes, according to Proterra founder Dale Hill.
I rode a Proterra bus last year around downtown San Jose (no, they did not let me drive), and thought the ride was smooth, clean and quiet — no belching tail pipe or roaring engine. Also, like the Tesla Roadster, the bus slowed immediately when the driver took his foot off the accelerator.
Hill said the bus isn’t a retrofitted diesel bus, which would make it heavier, but a fully electric vehicle that includes a storage system and a drive train that can work with an auxiliary power unit if necessary to extend the bus’s range. Proterra is also part of a pilot project for the Defense Department on hydrogen fuel cells and the hydrogen energy cycle. There’s a little more information on the bus’s technology on Proterra’s Web site.
Hill also told me he got the idea for the bus four or five years ago after the chief technology officer of MUNI (the San Francisco Municipal Transit Agency) took him for a drive up Telegraph Hill. (This hill is where Coit Tower stands. It’s also home to the flock of wild parrots that appeared in the 2007 movie, “The Wild Parrots of Telegraph Hill”).
“With a fast charge, if you put your thinking cap on for a minute, we can run the bus up the hill on battery power,” Hill said. “Coming down will recharge it — you could have an arm that catches the trolley and recharges it while it runs down Market Street.”
One goal last year was to get the cost of the bus down from over $1 million to below $300,000, and it looks like Proterra is making progress — last week the company announced a $20 million investment from MK Energy and Infrastructure to manufacture the buses, starting next year, in Greenville, SC.
Hill says Proterra will use the same technology to manufacture electric school buses, delivery vans and trucks.
