Cap Metro to shelve 46 new electric buses for a year after manufacturer bankruptcy

Capital Metropolitan Transportation Authority will put 46 brand-new electric buses in storage for at least a year, the latest fallout from an electrification goal the transit agency now admits was overly ambitious. The main problem, Capital Metro’s leadership says, has been the slow rollout of e-bus chargers at the end of routes to keep vehicles running all day.

Mothballing the battery-powered buses from the now bankrupt supplier Proterra will slow the planned expansion of transit services for thousands of Austin commuters, who are using Capital Metro at some of the highest levels since the pandemic. The transit agency averaged nearly 80,000 trips a day in September, the most recent month for which data is available.

As the million-dollar buses gather dust, Phoenix Motor Inc. – the Anaheim, California, company that acquired Proterra’s bus business in a bankruptcy auction – is struggling to service warranties and address technical issues that have plagued Capital Metro’s Proterra buses. Capital Metro says that’s why it chose Proterra buses to put in storage until the other infrastructure problems are fixed.

Phoenix Motor did not respond to a request seeking comment before this story was published.

Transit agencies across the country alleged in Proterra’s bankruptcy lawsuit that the company’s buses fail far more frequently than their diesel counterparts. Broward County, Florida, for example, claimed its first batch of Proterra buses had mechanical failures more than seven times as frequently as diesel buses, on average.

Phoenix Motor, whose stock has plummeted 89 percent since its 2022 NASDAQ debut, has agreed to pause Capital Metro’s bus warranties during the storage period, according to Capital Metro operations chief Andy Skabowski.

“We’re not going to be burning warranty,” he said.

The agency’s other e-bus supplier – Winnipeg, Canada-based New Flyer – is now providing Capital Metro additional services and parts. Forty of Capital Metro’s 58 buses from New Flyer will begin serving passengers, but only for eight hours a day until more chargers are installed at the end of bus routes.

Capital Metro says it remains committed to getting all 104 of its battery-electric buses up and running – about a quarter of the fleet – aiming to improve transit with quieter, smoother-riding vehicles while reducing emissions in a city flirting with air pollution levels that could violate new national standards.

“The best thing we can do for the environment is to get riders on to public transit,” Capital Metro CEO Dottie Watkins said. “The second best thing we can do, after we’ve gotten everybody on the buses, is to make those buses as clean as possible.”

With a quarter of the bus fleet electric, the transit system’s adoption rate would exceed European countries like Belgium and Norway, which have far more political and financial support for zero-emissions vehicles.

But the immediate delays mean a pair of planned high-frequency bus lines, part of the agency’s Project Connect vision, will launch next year with slower service and diesel buses instead of the electric vehicles promised under the voter-approved transit expansion.

Both routes will run through areas east of I-35 that currently lack any of Capital Metro’s higher-frequency Rapid service. The Pleasant Valley line will establish a transit spine from Southeast to Northeast Austin. The Expo Center line will offer a 45-minute ride from far Eastern Travis County into downtown Austin with stops at key destinations including Austin Community College Eastview and Dell Children’s Medical Center.

The newest setbacks also may raise questions about Capital Metro’s 2021 decision to split a massive e-bus purchasing contract between two companies. But the agency says the decision to store buses is a strategic move based on circumstances that couldn’t have been predicted three years ago.

Capital Metro board members and staff are now publicly acknowledging the complications of relying on two different vendors to provide electric vehicles for the Pleasant Valley and Expo Center lines.

“It would almost be like saying, ‘Hey, Austin … we’re building you a new light rail. We’re going to run like three different kinds of trains on that light rail,” Board Member Eric Stratton said during a meeting of the Capital Metro operations committee last week.

“It’s reasonable to make that comparison,” Skabowski responded. He emphasized the agency wants to move back to a single bus supplier for the new Rapid lines at this point.

“In order for us to successfully run (the Pleasant Valley and Expo lines) on a daily basis and have the buses out there that we need, we have to run over 40 electric buses every day,” Skabowski said. “Our goal is to get good at that, concentrate on that, make it so that way there’s less moving pieces, one vendor, one bus type, one charger type.”

Capital Metro’s push to be a national leader in the shift to an all-electric fleet has made it a de facto guinea pig for a fledgling industry still catching up to the reliability of electric cars. The lessons learned may pave the way for other transit agencies, but Austin’s bus commuters will bear the cost of delayed service expansions in the meantime.

This story was produced as part of the Austin Monitor’s reporting partnership with KUT.

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