These types of issues are not unique to us. We’ve since worked with New Flyer to re-engineer that component so the buses will charge properly. For example, in early December, we parked all five due to a design flaw with the electrical connectors on the roof of the bus. While a bug on your phone will just cause an app to restart, software glitches with our buses require support and testing before we can clear the bus to be put back into service.Īt this point, these buses are spending more time in the shop than we would like. And, just like your smartphone, there are updates to install, bugs to fix and optimizations to implement. Electric buses are complex machines with many different systems, all controlled by software. PGE also installed half a dozen, smaller chargers at our Merlo Operating Facility, where the buses plug in overnight.Īs with all new technology, lessons learned lead to updates and retrofits, and that’s no different with these buses. When it was built, the charger was the most powerful of its kind in North America. They provided the charging infrastructure, including the overhead charger you might have seen at Sunset Transit Center. The New Flyer XCELSIOR™ zero-emission battery-electric bus – which is what our first five electric buses are - didn’t exist when we started this project three years ago. Now that we have more than nine months of data, we wanted to share how the buses are doing. The route is ideal for the real-world trial we wanted, before committing millions of dollars on electric bus acquisition and rolling the buses out for wider service. It serves stops on some of Washington County’s notoriously congested roads, between Sunset Transit Center and Washington Square Transit Center. It’s a challenging, 26-mile route with 700 feet of elevation change and nearly 14,000 rides per week. Since then, we’ve been putting the buses – now numbering five - to a test on Line 62-Murray Blvd in Beaverton. Last April, we publically introduced our first zero-emission battery-electric bus, powered by 100% clean wind energy from Portland General Electric. The months since have been less glamorous but far more important.
A curtain dropped and the cameras flashed.
0 kommentar(er)
