With all the hoopla about EV being the future of public transit, let’s have a roundup how this experiment is working out.

Canada

Electric buses are a disaster for every Canadian city that tries them

Jamie Sarkonak catalogs the Canadian experience in his National Post article with the subtitle: Regina is just the latest city to report problems with unreliable battery-powered transit. Excerpts in italics with my bolds.

The news slipped out during Regina city council’s Monday budget hearing, when transit union president Sukhwinder Singh was asked whether electric buses have impacted costs.

Aside from being more expensive to run — defeating their original purpose of saving on gas money — Singh said they were “not for the Saskatchewan weather.” He added that four buses had to be pulled off the line and re-charged the previous Friday, as they had fallen to 15 per cent battery. “I’m not in favour of electric buses at all,” he said.

“For the winter, their battery dies very quickly, and they can just run for two, three hours, that’s all. The buses weren’t good for the summer either, because the charge couldn’t reliably last.”

And over in Saskatoon, city council has been trying to grow the electric fleet. It’s unclear why: city staff have warned that electric buses can’t last a full day of service on one charge, and that it takes 1.2 electric buses to replace a single diesel bus.

This was always a predictable outcome, particularly since Edmonton already wasted millions on the same kind of failed project. In 2018, back when climate was the issue du jour, the city came up with a plan to spend $43 million on electric buses.

Fast forward to today and Edmonton has 60 of these buses in its fleet of 1,000. In December 2023, it was reported that only one quarter of these were in working order due to a range of problems. The company that built them, Proterra, filed for bankruptcy. Edmonton joined in on the bankruptcy proceedings, claiming that it was owed $82 million for the bus fiasco. Edmonton lawyers claimed:

“None of the buses have ever achieved 328 km on a single charge,” and “On average, the bus range has been approximately 165 km in the winter and, at best, 250 km in warmer weather.”

These same lessons are learned again and again. In 2022, the feds and the government of Manitoba helped Winnipeg purchase 40 electric buses, which the city claimed would drive for “10 to 15 hours.” Earlier trials in Winnipeg showed that heating the cabin resulted in “performance losses”; adding a diesel heater limited those losses to 20 per cent or less. In extreme cold, electric bus batteries lost as much as 25% of their capacity, and snow increased energy usage by an additional 15%. The city’s first electric buses began operating over the summer; it remains to be reported how their first winter is going.

Finally, Toronto, which also started its electric bus journey in 2017, is also reporting failure. A city report from July buries the unflattering figures under a deluge of emissions-reduction statistics: from the beginning, these buses had shorter ranges than diesel units, which renders them unusable for many existing bus routes. And because of their finicky charging requirements and limited range, the electric buses “face challenges in responding to emergency subway closures, route diversions, and other unexpected events.”

The Magic School Bus

In 2021, Quebec mandated that all new school buses purchased in the province be electric as part of a goal to electrify 65 per cent of its bus fleet by 2030.

in September 2025, 1,200 Lion electric school buses were abruptly withdrawn from Quebec roads, prompting renewed criticism of the provincial government’s approach to electrification — and of its decision to give one local company a virtual monopoly.  Many school bus routes in Quebec remained cancelled following the government’s decision to pull all Lion buses out of service after a bus in Montreal caught fire last week.  Lion has sent instructions to school bus operators for the required inspections and repairs, apparently related to possible wiring issues. Three Lion buses have caught fire in the last year, though nobody has been injured and the buses’ batteries were not involved.

Andrew Jones, a Montreal-area school bus operator, said he has since cancelled orders for 20 new Lion buses, and has ordered diesel buses instead. He said:

“The eight Lion buses I already own are unreliable, in part because when they break down, it can take weeks to get the necessary parts or technicians from Lion.” “We’re subject to waiting on them 100 per cent of the time.”

United States

Electric buses are sitting unused in cities across the US; here’s why

FoxBusiness reports: Cities coast-to-coast grappling with broken-down e-buses that cannot be fixed

Between the federal government, states and municipalities, untold billions in taxpayer dollars have been spent adding electric buses to transit fleets across the U.S. in an effort to reduce carbon emissions.

Officials in Asheville, North Carolina, recently expressed frustration that three of the five e-buses the city purchased for millions in 2018 are now sitting idle due to a combination of software issues, mechanical problems and an inability to obtain replacement parts.

Earlier this month, The Denver Gazette reported two of the four e-buses Colorado Springs’ Mountain Metropolitan Transit acquired in 2021 are not running. They cost $1.2 million a piece, mostly paid for by government grants.

In 2020, The Philadelphia Tribune reported SEPTA’s entire $24 million fleet of Proterras had been pulled out of commission. A spokesperson for the transit agency would not get into the specifics of why the 25 buses – the third-largest fleet of all-electric buses in the U.S. at the time – were put on ice, but suggested the issues might be covered under the manufacturer’s warranty.

Attorneys representing Broward County, Florida, regarding Proterra’s bankruptcy, told the court Broward County purchased 42 buses from Proterra for $54 million, and the first batch only operated for an average of 600 miles before breaking down, while the second batch averaged 1,800. For comparison, the county’s diesel buses average 4,500 between failures, the filing said.

In New York City Battery Drain: MTA Trims New Flyer Electric Bus Order Amid Tech Growing Pains

The MTA will buy 85 fewer electric buses as its manufacturer tries
to sort out a way to keep them in service without breaking down.

MTA officials briefed the board in June on the problems plaguing the five-dozen electric buses the authority currently has in service, which cover only about 2,500 miles on the road before a mechanical breakdown takes them out of service, compared to 8,500 miles for diesel buses.

Officials have previously sounded the alarm in 2025 that the batteries that power the buses overheat or fail hold a full day’s charge, and that electric components that power systems like the air brakes were failing while buses were in service.

International

Electric Buses Are Struggling to Gain Traction Worldwide

Linda Poon provides a global picture in her Pacific Standard article, with this summary:

What prevents cities from adopting electric buses en masse is a mix of
technological, financial, and institutional challenges, according to
reports looking at efforts in 16 cities at various stages of adoption.

With the goal of curbing carbon emissions in mind, municipal leaders all over have pledged to partially, if not fully, replace their city’s fleet with e-buses over the next decades. A number of cities, from large metropolises like Mexico City to more modest ones like Philadelphia, have started pilot tests. One report from World Resource Institute focuses on three major types of barriers.

The cities studied range from Addis Ababa in Ethiopia—where there’s been “no substantial planning” around electric buses—to cities like Philadelphia and Campinas, Brazil, which, respectively, are running a pilot test and expanding its number of e-buses, to successful cases in Shenzhen and the nearby Zhengzhou. They vary geographically, with some in developed nations like Chile and Spain, and other in emerging countries like India.

It means that when cities consider adopting electric buses, they need to understand the power grid upgrades and charging infrastructure required, and challenges associated with that. Failure to do so is the most common mistake, according to Gorguinpour. Many cities just set up their charging stations thinking that things would “work themselves out.”

That’s why he says one of the most overlooked stories from Shenzhen’s experience is the city’s long process in setting up the charging infrastructure to support more than 16,000 electric buses. Each bus has a range of about 124 miles on a single charge of 252 kilowatt hours (KWh). In total, the fleet can eat more than 4,000 megawatt-hours (MWh). For comparison’s sake, 1 MWh is enough to power about 300 homes for an hour. “That’s an insane amount of power required, not to mention real estate,” he says. “And the process to identify what land is available, then to work with the utilities—even just figuring out the optimal location—is a hugely important task, and incredibly challenging.”

That gets into the financial barriers. Cities across the globe often cited higher expenses as the primary challenge to procuring a fleet. While cities that adopt e-buses do end up saving money over the longer term in things like fuel (not to mention the harder-to-quantify value of cleaner air and fewer greenhouse emission), the upfront costs represent significant challenges. In the case studies, the price of a new e-bus ranged between $300,000 and $900,000 per bus, with the report noting that the prices vary dramatically depending on the manufacturer, specifications, and the location of the transit agency. In the United States, an electric bus averages around $750,000, while a conventional diesel bus is around $435,000.

When cities decide to implement electric buses, Gorguinpour says the cities focus too much on those upfront costs and not enough on the “life cycle cost.” Or, in the case of Belo Horizonte in Brazil, to get operators on board with full adoption. In some cases—as in Chile’s capital city of Santiago, which has the largest e-bus fleet outside of China—it’s utility companies, not transit agencies, that have stepped up to finance the projects.

Footnote:  And It Is All So Unnecessary