Two sectors eager for electric vehicles

As American car buyers dip their toes into the world of electric vehicles, pondering cost, charging times and driving range, big businesses and some government agencies are going in headfirst.

The Antelope Valley Transit Authority in California, which serves some 450,000 residents in parts of Los Angeles County, wants to be the first transit agency with an allelectric bus fleet. It hopes to ditch all its diesel vehicles by the end of the year and replace them with 80 fully electric versions.

Reducing pollutants is a high priority for Antelope Valley, because the area has the highest rate of asthma and deaths from respiratory diseases in the county, according to the county health department.

The same factors that appeal to consumers make an electric vehicle a good fit for commercial applications. Electric motors offer the low-speed torque such vehicles need, without the roar or exhaust of their diesel counterparts. And while range anxiety could be a concern for the typical car buyer, operators of buses and similar vehicles tend to stay close to home, needing a range of 100 miles or less.

Even as Tesla has promised to apply its passenger-car experience to long-haul trucking, a host of companies are already offering fully electric commercial vehicles to governments and private industries looking to turn mail trucks and garbage haulers into vehicles of the future.

McKinsey & Co., the management consulting group, forecasts that electric light- and mediumduty trucks — that includes pickups, flatbeds and some trash haulers — could achieve between 8 percent and 34 percent sales penetration by 2030. The range depends on market conditions: Fleet owners need parity in the total cost of ownership between a traditional diesel-powered vehicle and an electric one. And municipal air-quality regulations may spur or slow down the adoption of electric commercial fleets.

“Our latest perspective is that U.S. break-even for long haul could be between 2025 and 2030,” said Russell Hensley, one of the report’s authors.

Hensley said two factors were holding back the commercial electric market: a limited number of models and the relative infancy of fast-charging technology.

But businesses and governments are jumping on board. This month, the Chicago Transit Authority agreed to buy 20 electric buses from Proterra at an estimated cost of $32 million. In May, San Francisco said it would begin buying only electric buses starting in 2025.

Rozette Rago / New York Times A bus is assembled at the BYD plant in Lancaster, Calif. The Chinese company building Antelope Valley Transit Authority’s electric buses, BYD, is the worlds largest manufacturer of electric vehicles.