A vehicle built to make school travel greener across the US has gained a little more traction this week, with Daimler’s Thomas Built Buses entering an agreement to provide 50 all-electric Jouley buses for the state of Virginia. This will be the single biggest deployment of electric school buses in the US to date, and will begin to displace diesel-powered vehicles from next year.
Thomas Built Buses debuted its Jouley electric school bus back in 2017, showing off a 160-kWh battery-powered pupil-mover capable of covering 160 km (100 mi) on each charge. This has now been beefed up to 220 kWh courtesy of battery tech from Proterra, pushing that range figure out to an estimated 215 km (134 mi).
The all-electric Saf-T-Liner C2, as the model is called, can be recharged in around three hours using Proterra’s 60-kW DC fast charger, and can also feed its leftover power back into the grid.
The agreement is part of an initiative from power company Dominion Energy to replace diesel-powered school buses with electric versions in the state of Virginia. While it has selected Thomas Built Buses as the provider of this first 50, the program aims to follow next year’s batch with a further 200 per year across the next five years.
You can check out the short promo video for the program below.
Source: Thomas Built Buses
