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Maine’s Department of Education is reportedly urging school districts to stop using taxpayer-subsidized electric school buses that were purchased within the last year. The districts reported problems with the new buses, which were supplied by Canada-based Lion Electric Co., last fall ... The windshields on the buses would leak whenever it rained, as the glass didn’t appear to be securely in place. concerns about mixing electricity and water from the leaking windshields led them to stop driving some of the buses. The buses, which cost about $345,000 each, were also sold with misaligned or incorrect lettering on the sides, and...

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. However, cities from coast-to-coast are grappling with broken-down e-buses that cannot be fixed, are too expensive to fix, or they have scrapped their electric fleets altogether. 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,...

ASHEVILLE, N.C. — The city of Asheville's purchase of five electric buses in 2018 has turned into a multi-million-dollar loss. The buses have been broken or unable to run because of software and/or mechanical issues, making them an expensive and disappointing purchase, according to city maintenance and transportation staff. ... Currently, three of the five buses are idled, with one that has had a broken double door since July. “We haven’t been able to get new doors,” Asheville's interim transportation director Jessica Morriss said. “There's no third party that makes a door. We'd have to get custom-made doors.” Each of...

Proterra, which President Joe Biden once said was "making me look good," sold hundreds of electric buses to municipalities across North America. Every transit district Just The News spoke with, except one, has inoperable buses awaiting repairs. Across the country, towns and cities of various sizes envisioned an electrified public transit system that could shuttle residents with vehicles that produced no carbon-filled exhaust. Many of those communities purchased buses from Silicon Valley-based Proterra, which was able to produce 550 buses over its 19-year existence before it went bankrupt in August. The company announced last month it had concluded auctions as...

Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm made $1.6 million from an electric car company the Biden administration boosted that just went bankrupt. Proterra, an electric bus and battery company that President Joe Biden touted as a success of his green energy initiative, filed for bankruptcy in August. Last week, it finally sold its embattled battery business at a rock-bottom price as part of the bankruptcy proceeding. The rise and fall of Proterra demonstrates once again that politicians should refrain from betting taxpayers’ money on business ventures to advance their political agenda. According to the Wall Street Journal, Proterra has sold only 550...

Gareth Joyce, the CEO and a board member of California-based electric bus maker Proterra, continues to serve on a top White House council advising President Biden on trade policy even after his company filed for bankruptcy.

SAN JOSE – Two Santa Clara Valley Transportation Authority (VTA) mechanics were sent to the hospital Friday after an electric transit bus caught fire at a maintenance yard in San Jose Friday afternoon.

Amtrak has replaced a diesel-powered bus on the Pacific Northwest’s Cascades route with its first electric bus. Amtrak, which partnered with the Washington Department of Transportation (WSDOT) to roll out its new electric bus, will run it between Seattle and Bellingham, filling the gap between the morning and evening trains on the Cascades route. It uses buses all over the US to run thruway connecting services, which are scheduled to connect with Amtrak trains. Amtrak’s first electric bus is a 45-foot Van Hool CX45e. It has a 660 kWh Proterra lithium-ion battery system and 260 miles of range. It’s owned...

The investment firm run by liberal billionaire George Soros was a major investor in a now-bankrupt electric bus company that was heralded by the Biden administration as the future of green transit, and lost as much as $105 million in the two years since the company went public, according to a Daily Wire analysis. Soros Fund Management was one of the earliest investors in Proterra — when the company went public in June 2021 the fund owned 7.75 million shares of the company, an investment worth over $132 million dollars, according to legally required quarterly disclosures. The stock price of...

The Biden administration’s top energy official held multiple talks with a Chinese Communist Party official linked to an oil company counting investment from Hunter Biden’s private equity firm just days before the U.S. moved to release oil from its strategic reserve in 2021. Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm controversially spoke with China National Energy Administration chairman Zhang Jianhua one-on-one multiple times in meetings that had not previously been reported, according to internal Energy Department calendars obtained by Fox News. Granholm and her Chinese Communist Party counterpart met on November 19th and 21st, 2021, just days before the White House announced its...

President Biden frequently extolled an electric vehicle company — in which his energy secretary heavily invested — before it declared bankruptcy on Monday. Bay Area-based electric bus and battery maker Proterra filed for Chapter 11, with CEO Gareth Joyce citing “various market and macroeconomic headwinds that have impacted our ability to efficiently scale.” The EV firm, which sold more than 1,300 electric buses to public transit systems in the US and Canada, was valued at $1.6 billion when Biden, 80, took office in January 2021 — but closed with a market value of $362 million, according to Reuters.

Proterra, the electric bus company at the center of an apparent conflict of interest involving Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm, has filed for bankruptcy, Reuters reported Monday evening. Granholm drew immense scrutiny when it was revealed that she maintained her financial positions in the firm, for which she used to sit on the board of directors, after she assumed her post as the leader of the Department of Energy (DOE) and began to direct policies which could have favored her own financial interests. Granholm eventually closed her position in the firm late in May 2021, and netted capital gains amounting to...

The term "pedestrian" has a derogatory meaning because peasants walked while nobles were "equestrians" and rode horses. The industrial revolution eliminated this class difference, as it did so many others, by making car ownership available to the masses until eventually Herbert Hoover was able to boast that "Republican prosperity has reduced and increased earning capacity” to "put the proverbial 'chicken in every pot' and a car in every backyard to boot." Democrats have spent two generations trying to get those cars out of every backyard. Biden is trying to bring back Obama's mileage standards that were estimated to raise car...

Vice President Kamala Harris and Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg joined forces on Thursday to promote Proterra, a Burlingame, California-based electric bus company that Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm previously sat on the board of and held stock in, which garnered her $1.6 million when she finally divested them 157 days after her nomination. This happened during an event at Charlotte Area Transit System in Charlotte, North Carolina that was meant to tout the “marquee legislation” in President Joe Biden’s legislative agenda — the infrastructure bill and the reconciliation package — from two of Biden’s highest-profile cabinet members. While at the event,...

An electric bus made by Proterra went up in flames while charging in a California city that is reportedly thinking about removing the electric buses from the road. The Foothill Transit agency, which serves the valleys surrounding Los Angeles, will decide on Friday whether costly Proterra buses purchased in the last decade are still operable. Problems cited by the agency include not only the bus that caught fire in what’s described as a “thermal event,” but also buses that melt in the California heat and have transmission failures. Roland Cordero, the agency’s director of maintenance and vehicle technology, says the...

An electric bus manufactured by Proterra caught fire while charging in a southern California city that is now considering taking the electric buses off the road, according to government records.

Proterra Bus Fire Prompts California Agency to Consider Shelving Electric Bus FleetElectric buses are melting in sun, too expensive to fix, transit official says An electric bus manufactured by Proterra caught fire while charging in a southern California city that is now considering taking the electric buses off the road, according to government records. The Foothill Transit agency, which serves the valleys surrounding Los Angeles, will decide on Friday whether costly Proterra buses purchased in the last decade are still operable. Problems cited by the agency include not only the bus that caught fire in what's described as a "thermal...

Philadelphia, Pennsylvania is one of the deep-blue cities that’s been priding itself in leading the charge against climate change for years now. Back in 2016, they decided to establish a position as an early adopter of electric vehicle technology on a large scale to reduce their carbon footprint. The city purchased 25 electric buses from a company called Protera at a staggering price tag of nearly one million dollars apiece and put them into operation. But barely four years later, every one of the buses had been pulled from service and is deemed unusable. What went so horribly wrong to...

More than two dozen electric Proterra buses first unveiled by the city of Philadelphia in 2016 are already out of operation, according to a WHYY investigation. The entire fleet of Proterra buses was removed from the roads by SEPTA, the city's transit authority, in February 2020 due to both structural and logistical problems—the weight of the powerful battery was cracking the vehicles' chassis, and the battery life was insufficient for the city's bus routes. The city raised the issues with Proterra, which failed to adequately address the city's concerns. The city paid $24 million for the 25 new Proterra buses,...

The Department of Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm this week sold her holding in electric bus maker Proterra, according to a report. Granholm’s stock sale comes after she previously received an ethics waiver to dump the massive holding and hearing pushback from Republicans demanding an investigation into her investment and alleged ongoing connection with the company.