OM in the News: Meet the Electric School Bus

“Forget the Prius”, says today’s Wall Street Journal (Dec.28,2011). “The future of electric is the school bus”. It seems that Americans just love long drives in fast cars too much for electric cars to be our country’s solution to green transportation.  But the routine runs of electric school buses are another matter. Whereas most current school buses run on diesel fuel, have the aerodynamic profile of a box, and get mileage in the single digits (5-6 mpg), a new generation of zero-emission, hybrid buses may be slowly taking over.

School buses, it turns out, are perfectly suited to be electric vehicles. They cover short distances on daily runs, follow set and predictable routes (making it unlikely their batteries die during the route), and spend a lot of the day sitting in depots, giving them plenty of time to recharge. They also make frequent stops, which while bad for fuel efficiency in a conventional bus, actually helps recharge electric vehicle batteries while  brakes are applied.

Money is the prime obstacle, in that a hybrid costs 60% more than a diesel school bus. But hybrids can improve fuel economy by 65% and if budgets were not hurting so badly in many school districts, fleets would be expanding rapidly.  School districts can recover the $30,000 price differential in 3-5 years through  fuel savings once the investment is made.

Navistar Int’l, Trans Tech, and Smith Electric Vehicles are three of the major players in the electric school bus industry.

Discussion questions:

1. Why is this an OM issue?

2. In what other ways can a school district use sustainability (Ch.7) to actually save money?