Joel N. Weber II
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Despite buses being off-the-shelf products, the T still needs to go through a competitive bidding process to ensure that they're getting the best value for their money. There was no guarantee that New Flyer would produce the next batch of 60-foot buses for the T. Second, the market for 60-foot buses in North America is very small, let alone 60-foot hybrids. Why would New Flyer expend so much R&D resources on a feature or product that only a handful of cities would have an interest in? If the T required a powered center axle, then the cost of each bus would have more than doubled because the T would have had to pay for R&D costs. For only 25 buses that are supposed to last only 12 years and with a feature that would be used for less than 10 days per year, that's a proposition that I, as a taxpayer, would not be happy with.
It costs as much as building 25 buses to figure out how to remount the electric motor on the center axle and fix the software to cope with that? Or it would have cost as much as building 25 buses to figure out how to add batteries to the otherwise perfectly good powertrain design that we have for the dual mode buses?
New Flyer is going to survive just fine. The 60-foot bus market is a niche; the 40-foot market is where the money is. You're complaining about a feature that would be useful for only small number of days per year and for a very small market segment.
No, I'm complaining about their ability to adopt reasonable technological improvements. If they fall behind on converting 40 foot bus production to batteries, why should we assume they won't go the way of Studebaker?
The issue isn't with battery capacity; the Allison EP50 hybrid system is designed to propel only one axle, not two.
So why not mount the electric motor on the center axle instead of the rear axle?