“Balanced moderation” lol. Well you’re in luck. Folks have been digging through her likes and follows on Twitter and it looks like she’s leans fairly right.
Well if you want to see one way the battery swapping model can fail work, check out the book Totaled, which is about the Israeli EV startup Better Place that tried battery swapping before Tesla was a thing. Granted there were a lot of complicating factors that may not apply in the Tesla case (securing battery swapping locations in Israel came with specific challenges), but it may provide some insight.
Recently switched from Safari to Firefox because of the awful extensions environment in Safari but definitely missing the battery life. Really wish one browser could just get everything right
The upfront cost is no longer prohibitive with all-electric buses realizing savings in the form of reduced maintenance and fuel costs that exceed the initial investment discrepancy [1-2].
On your second point, a bus doesn't necessarily have to have a heavy steel frame for it to be safe. There are plenty of lighter weight (e.g. composite/carbon fiber) solutions which don't sacrifice safety.
Sure, if the mileage requirements are low then there's definitely a cost-effective retrofit solution. But if you're a company already building a full electric bus and investing a lot of R&D into the pack design anyway, then you could probably just sell battery solutions to school bus companies as another revenue stream. I'd wager, though, that the larger addressable market is customers looking for new electric buses for longer routes.
Not sure if by "converting" you mean retrofitting old buses or replacing diesel buses with new electric buses. If it's the former definition, it's non-trivial from a safety and engineering standpoint to integrate a high-voltage, high-energy battery system into an old bus and expect to realize a decent ROI. Those old clunkers are not designed with an electric powertrain nor efficiency (i.e. they're heavy and have have drag coefficients) in mind. Furthermore, safety is paramount in most bus operations, and a lot of thought needs to go into mitigating thermal runaway or other catastrophic failure modes with systems of that voltage (100s of V) and energy (300kWh+). Depending on the existing bus system that the battery needs to be integrated into, this can be challenging and sometimes infeasible.
I say all of this more to make the argument that rather than retrofit old buses, in my opinion it makes more sense to outright replace them. Right now Proterra is the largest domestic producer of pure electric buses. They compete on most contracts with BYD in China, and New Flyer in Canada. Behind BYD and the government, the electric bus market in China has absolutely exploded over the last several years. Proterra is anticipating high growth in the U.S. market as well and just launched a new factory in LA last month [2].
While I agree that some of the blame falls on the PIs, it should fall on the university system as well. My PI recently read his mid-tenure review to our group, noting that there are explicit publishing metrics evaluated by the department which play a major role in his performance review. Things like ranking of journals published in (ref. Reuters InCites), # citations etc. I understand a department's desire for a quantitative evaluation metric, but at the same time as long as this mechanism is in place the system will not change.
edit: throw the Pacific Pinball Museum in Alameda on here too