Ford Introduces An E-Transit-Based Electric School Bus

Under the IRA, school districts can avail themselves of a further $20,000 in credits for EV chargers, making the investment in infrastructure much easier to swallow. Now is an especially good time for the school bus package to be announced for yet another reason.

In some areas, school districts are being required to replace old buses with EVs soon. New York wants the entire fleet to be electric by 2035, while Boston expects to revitalize its fleet with electric vehicles in 2030. This puts Ford in a great position.

Ford can attract customers that rivals without an alternative school bus package cannot. And on the combustion side of things, the sale of more electric vehicles, particularly in fleet volumes, will mean that vehicles like the Mustang can continue to be unelectrified for a long time to come. CEO Jim Farley said last year that electric products like the Mustang Mach-E "allowed this car [the V8 Mustang] to happen," adding that "competitors are buying credits for emissions, and they can't come out with this kind of vehicle."

According to the New York School Bus Contractors Association (NYSBCA), there are currently more than 480,000 yellow school buses across America, with these transporting an estimated 26 million students to and from school. These buses travel around 12,000 miles per year, which amounts to almost 6 billion miles across the entire fleet. The NYSBCA also notes that "school buses are the largest mass transit program in the US," providing roughly 10 billion student trips a year, compared to transit buses that only provide around 5.2 billion unlinked passenger trips a year.

Each school bus uses 1,700 gallons of fuel a year, which works out to 816 million gallons across the fleet. Remove those fuel costs, as well as most servicing costs, and an electric school transit system could save fortunes annually.

School buses are a big contributor to carbon emissions, and those particulates pose a health risk to kids. Electric school buses need not be engaging to drive, have massive range, or provide otherworldly acceleration. In our mind, there is no obvious drawback to electrifying the nation's school buses.