Despite Early Issues, Electric Buses Keep Chugging Along and More are Joining

By Joshua Solórzano

October 21, 2022

Although electric buses continue to have some issues, Whatcom Transportation Authority is hopeful they won’t persist and think the buses do their job well.

One of WTA’s electric buses at Bellingham’s waterfront. Photo courtesy of Whatcom Transportation Authority.

Two more buses are joining the Whatcom Transportation Authority’s fleet of electric buses, despite the first pair having numerous software and some mechanical issues at launch in April 2021.

By early 2023, two more grant-funded electric buses are joining WTA’s fleet of nearly zero-emission buses, according to Maureen McCarthy, WTA’s Director of Community and Government Relations. In addition to those two electric buses, McCarthy said WTA is getting ready to place an order for eight more electric buses because they received a federal grant to help pay the difference between electric and diesel buses. 

McCarthy said those eight additional buses will not arrive for a few years. How many years it will be until those eight buses arrive is uncertain, McCarthy said, because these buses take a long time to order and arrive. So it could be two or three years, but currently, there’s no specific date for the arrival of those buses.

When these newer electric buses arrive, McCarthy hopes they don’t have many issues like the first pair of buses. Still, if they do, she hopes the situation is similar to the problems with the first hybrid buses. 

“One of the things that we experienced with the hybrids, because those were also kind of the first generation for Gillig, the manufacturer, was a lot of the problems that the first-year buses had were fixed in subsequent years,” McCarthy said.

In the first year after these hybrid buses arrived, McCarthy, the buses had a “shakedown period” characterized by minor software issues. But, after some back and forth with Gillig, who manufactures all of WTA’s buses, she said the buses ran beautifully.

McCarthy didn’t know much more about the specific details of the electric bus problems, but Bruce McKay, the lead fleet maintenance technician for WTA and a diesel tech by trade, does. Previously, he only worked with diesel and hybrid buses, but now he deals with electric buses in addition to his regular work.

“A lot of times [the issues] start with the software,” McKay said. “These things haven’t been on the road yet, so there’s no recorded data history on them. They make all these software programs with all these parameters, then you put them out there, and you learn over time. These parameters might not work, or there’s data they don’t expect.” 

Because this technology is so new, McKay said there’s no way that there wouldn’t be software issues, and he doesn’t know how to deal with them. “Ghost codes,” is what he called them. 

“That’s way above my pay grade where you look into the engineering stuff,” he said. “They look at what’s called a can log, which is how the bus communicates. So, they monitor the software and rewrite it to adjust the parameters as they’re developing.”

Despite WTA being unable to do much maintenance, McKay said the manufacturers are right by their side, learning with them. Often the issue at hand is something the manufacturer has never seen before. 

Some issues are severe enough to put buses out of commission. McKay said a bus was once inoperable for a stretch of 100 days, and then after they fixed it, it was inoperable for over 45 days. When the buses were inoperable for an extended period, it was attributed to the drive train, not the drive system, which causes code issues. McKay said they could usually work around drive system issues, and the bus could continue running.

When the buses are fully operable and working well, their range falls short compared to diesel buses. But, for their intended purpose to lower emissions, McKay said they do their job, despite the electric buses requiring a small amount of diesel for the heater.

“Perfect range, when you can get everything you can out of them, is maybe 150 miles a day. On an average day, about 120, 130 [miles],” McKay said. “Say you have a day when you’re using a lot of heat, you’re in the snow or rain, and it’s dark, you can get as low as 90 miles a day.” 

McKay said diesel buses could handle the most extensive WTA routes, around 300 miles long. A diesel bus can run for about 16 hours on those long days, in comparison, McKay said they could get a solid 10 hours a day out of the electric buses. So, electric buses are more suited for shorter routes of about 70 miles. 

Although electric buses aren’t perfect at launch and don’t have the same range as diesel buses, they’re not too far off from what a diesel bus can do, but without the dirty emissions.

Joshua Solórzano is a fourth-year Visual Journalism major and Spanish minor. He reports on all things interesting, but at The Planet Magazine, his job is to bring in the voices of the community, specifically the voices of those doing things environment-related. Habla español con fluidez.