LTD reports reliability and range issues with its electric buses

Presenter: After encountering reliability issues and range anxiety, the Lane Transit District hopes to reduce the number of electric buses in its fleet. At the board meeting March 12, Chief Operating Officer Mike Hursh:

Mike Hursh (LTD, COO): Today, I will be briefing you on our experience operating and maintaining zero-emission battery buses. We currently have 30 New Flyer electric buses. This is almost 30% of our fleet. That’s a very high number for any fleet in the United States right now.

[00:00:28] For some history: In 2017, Lane Transit District made its first attempt to integrate battery electric buses into its fleet, spending $4 million on five electric BYD—stands for Build Your Dreams, a Chinese company bus manufacturer.

[00:00:44] After two years of issues, lack of vendor support, and very limited revenue service time, these buses were ultimately returned to the manufacturer.

[00:00:52] BYD has since essentially been banned from selling transit buses in the U.S. due to Buy America requirements. The good news is fortunately that LTD was able to recoup the $4 million from that first venture.

[00:01:04] Challenges with transition to battery buses is not unique to LTD. Both Reno, Nevada and Albuquerque, New Mexico returned significant number of buses and even in California with the 2040 mandate to transition all buses, most agencies are discussing slowing plans while the struggle with the high capital costs, lack of great capacity and range anxiety continue to grow.

[00:01:29] In keeping with LTD commitment to reduce our carbon footprint, 11 battery buses were purchased from New Flyer in 2019, followed by 19 more New Flyer battery buses in 2021, costing close to $30 million.

[00:01:44] It should be noted that since we made our purchase, the availability of manufacturers has been cut in half with BYD banned, Proterra and ElDorado going out of business, leaving essentially Gillig in California and New Flyer in Anniston, Alabama as the currently only viable suppliers.

And the average battery bus price has increased 30% to 35% since the pandemic. It’s basically $1.3 million for a battery bus compared to $800,000 or $900,000 for a diesel bus.

[00:02:15] We coincidentally had a meeting with Gillig this morning and they informed us in addition to normal producer price index increases, we can expect a 2% to 4% tariff increase for the next buses we purchase.

[00:02:31] Today, an average of approximately half, nearly 17 of the LTD battery fleet is not available for service on any given day. As many as 23 buses have been down at one time. The most we’ve ever had available for service on one day is 25.

[00:02:47] Hiring, training and building proficiency to our mechanics is one of our greatest challenges. It’s very rare to hire a standard bus mechanic. It’s even rarer to find a battery zero emission bus mechanic or technician.

[00:03:01] I want to talk a little bit about range variation on hot and cold days. The bus has much different traveling distances. Imagine your family vacation. One day you fuel your car, you can go 200 miles on a normal day, the next day a cold or hot day, you can only go 80 or 90 miles with that same amount of fuel in your tank. That is incredibly difficult to schedule reliable public transit with those challenges.

Defects that drive bus down times have consistently been related to the electric propulsion system issues. And again, that’s not unique to Lane Transit. That’s what we see in the industry.

[00:03:37] We’ve had a lot of problems with batteries. We’ve replaced 32 individual batteries since operating the New Flyer buses. Diagnosing, replacing and balancing a high-voltage battery is a very time-consuming effort as there are 35 to 42 individual batteries depending on the year of manufacturer for the bus. Even with improvements, downtime for this defect is excessive.

[00:04:01] Congratulations and kudos to the LTD team who has recently been able to improve repair time for defective batteries significantly from an average of six weeks down to an average of two weeks. This was done through the procurement of specialized battery test equipment at a cost of $50,000.

However, two weeks is a long time for a bus to be out of service. Even with the improvement, it’s still hamstringing our ability to provide all the buses necessary for a day of service. The batteries are warrantied for 12 years, but because we use federal dollars, the buses are required to operate for 12 years of service.

[00:04:39] There’s another issue we challenge, which is essentially the equivalent of a ‘Check engine’ light in your car. You can go to the maintenance shop and have that scanned. For us, we are required to use a data logger and operate the bus for two to four hours, and then send those data logs to New Flyer, which sometimes can take multiple days to the engineers to analyze the data. Sometimes they need more data.

[00:05:03] From the days of an original combustion engine bus to now, there are 18, a minimum of 18 microprocessors on your typical zero-emission bus. Trouble shooting alone can take one to three days. Looking ahead, New Flyer is still modifying the system. We were notified of a recall affecting five of our buses just this week. Essentially, these buses are an in-service research and development project.

[00:05:29] Gillig has been very late to the market. Time will tell. Capital costs remain extremely higher. And we were told today that if we purchase a battery bus from Gillig, the lead time is a minimum of two years. The more types of buses from a technology perspective, the more parts we have to have in stock and newer technology parts tend to take longer to procure.

[00:05:50] Finally, the challenges of the zero-emission fleet has required us to hold on to older buses and maintain a larger fleet in order to sustain service. This hits us with associated labor capacity issues as higher and higher parts, labor cost issues.

[00:06:04] Presenter: LTD Board Member Pete Knox:

[00:06:07] Pete Knox (LTD, board member): I’ve been reading about some of the challenges other transit agencies have been having with battery electric buses and want to kind of understand some of the problems that we’re having a little bit better.

[00:06:18] So the battery packs on the bus are multiple cell battery cells. Is that correct? (Correct.) So if one of those goes down, the whole thing goes down. Is that…?

[00:06:31] Mike Hursh (LTD, COO): Depending on the severity of the failure in that individual cell, the entire bus can go down. Or at a minimum you get degraded performance, again, leading to range anxiety.

[00:06:40] In the industry, there have also been a problem with batteries lighting off. There are several transit agencies that have lost multiple buses due to fires in the battery compartment.

[00:06:51] Pete Knox (LTD, board member): And then you say the point of failure is that electric motor?

[00:06:55] Mike Hursh (LTD, COO): In my experience, electric motors have not been the failure. It’s been inverter and battery cell challenges. And then again, various microprocessors that will throw a fault code and have to be sent to the manufacturer and they give us magic things to say change this component without really understanding, again, because of proprietary technology, what’s failed on that particular component or board. –

[00:07:17] Pete Knox (LTD, board member): Okay, I get it, it’s the battery and the delivery of the power to the system that’s the real point of failure.

[00:07:25] Mike Hursh (LTD, COO): Correct. And I should share, you know, I’m new to the state of Oregon. I just spent 32 years in California. In California, we can’t even get the electricity to charge the buses. So you’re blessed here having the availability of electricity, but you still have the range anxiety because of the weather swings that we experience here.

[00:07:43] Pete Knox (LTD, board member): Do we have a federal requirement for how many buses we keep in service?

[00:07:49] Mike Hursh (LTD, COO): Any bus that is procured with federal dollars is required to operate for 12 years. If you don’t operate it for 12 years, you have to repay the remaining federal interest back to the Federal Transit Administration. There’s no federal requirement for zero-emission buses and I don’t foresee one at least for the next four years.

[00:08:06] Presenter: LTD Board Member Gino Grimaldi:

[00:08:09] Gino Grimaldi (LTD, board member): So the timeline again. We bought the first buses what year?

[00:08:12] Mike Hursh (LTD, COO): 2017 and 2019.

[00:08:15] Gino Grimaldi (LTD, board member): And when did we start experiencing—

[00:08:18] Mike Hursh (LTD, COO): From day one. (From day one.) From day one. In fact, New Flyer is still here. The buses are still under warranty and much of the warranty work is done by New Flyer technicians.

[00:08:28] Gino Grimaldi (LTD, board member): I know you weren’t here, but I wonder why we continued to purchase problematic buses.

[00:08:34] Mike Hursh (LTD, COO): Yeah, I can speculate on that. The battery electric industry in particular, really did an excellent job of marketing to policymakers, and they were just blatantly, I’ll say it, dishonest about the range.

[00:08:47] And then as soon as we saw large fleets getting delivered, Albuquerque and Reno are two examples, the truth came out. Now the truth is out.

[00:08:55] Even in California with the 2040 mandate, they’re all looking, and I just came from an agency that was the leader in zero emission. We’re all looking for ways to back off because of the, just the cost, the, yet the reliability or, and for agency of our size, 30% is far too many.

[00:09:11] Presenter: Board Member Susan Cox.

[00:09:13] Susan Cox (LTD, board member): Do I remember at one point, one of the buses caught fire and burned before it even was delivered? … Sobering.

[00:09:21] Presenter: LTD CEO Jameson Auten:

[00:09:23] Jameson Auten (LTD, CEO, March 12, 2025): The last bus procurement this board approved was for diesel vehicles and we use renewable diesel, which is R99, which is in compliance with the alternative fuels as well. We’re going to look to see how we can reduce the percentage of electric buses in our fleet. Mike mentioned several times California has a mandate. We started to reach out to different agencies in California to see if there’s any interest in the buses that we have and having us replace those with diesel vehicles.

[00:09:59] Again, that 30% number is very high. I don’t know the decision in ’19 or ’21 to go with that percentage, but we do know that it’s been problematic to make service and really have to give hats off to Eric’s maintenance team over there making that magic happen because we do make service. It’s just incredibly hard.

[00:10:22] So we’re going to kind of sniff the industry a little bit and see if there’s some interest. And if we can increase our percentage of diesel buses using the R99 to remain in compliance, we think that’d be a good solution.

[00:10:36] Presenter: Gino Grimaldi:

[00:10:38] Gino Grimaldi (LTD, board member): Well, thank you. It’s never easy to deliver news like that, but I think it’s refreshing to know that we have staff that are willing to admit that we’ve taken the wrong path and need to take a different path. So, thank you all.

[00:10:51] Presenter: With an average of 17 of its 30 electric buses not in service on any given day, LTD shares plans to reduce the number of electric buses in its fleet.