Blue Bird opens electric school bus factory to build 5,000 buses per year
Blue Bird has opened a new “Electric Vehicle Build-Up Center” on the grounds of its main manufacturing plant in Fort Valley, Georgia. The 40,000 square foot facility will help the company reach production of 5,000 electric school buses per year.
Blue Bird is headquartered in Georgia and has built school buses there for 91 years.
The new facility will assemble electric versions of Blue Bird’s “Vision” and “All American” model buses, carrying 77 and 84 passengers respectively. The Vision is a classic “Type C” bus, while the All American is a “Type D” bus with a flat front end. Both have a 155kWh battery and roughly 120 miles of range.
Blue Bird celebrated its grand opening with a short promotional video on its YouTube channel:
The company currently builds 4 electric school buses per day, but wants to increase that number to 20 per day. Electric buses currently make up 6% of Blue Bird’s total volume, and about 1,000 electric Blue Bird buses are in operation today.
But the company expects those numbers to go up fast, especially due to billions of dollars in incentives from the infrastructure plan passed under President Biden. These incentives make electric school buses a no-brainer (to the point they’re nearly free for some districts).
And new EPA emissions rules mean that about a third of school bus sales will be electric by 2027, and half by 2032.
As a result of these policies, Blue Bird thinks it will sell thousands of additional EV school buses, to the tune of about $1 billion in orders over the course of the next five years.
Georgia, the state where Blue Bird is headquartered, has seen a lot of manufacturing announcements as a result of new federal policies on electric vehicles. Several companies are opening new car and battery manufacturing facilities in the state, with Georgia becoming an important part of a new “battery belt” in the region, despite the state’s oft-indifference to necessary climate action.
This influx of green jobs stands to benefit Georgia and neighboring states (well, most of them anyway), as the Biden Administration attempts to onshore EV manufacturing with new policies in the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law and Inflation Reduction Act. Manufacturing jobs are generally thought of as being particularly beneficial to an economy, and Blue Bird says that this facility will help it sustain 2,000 good paying jobs. Its workers voted to unionize just last week, in hopes to ensure that they get a fair share of the benefits of this growth in green jobs.
School buses are a particularly ripe area for electrification, as school bus duty cycles are amenable to electric powertrains. School buses drive short fixed routes on most days, have long periods of time in the middle of the day or overnight that they are parked and able to charge (or discharge to help the grid), and most importantly of all they don’t spew disgusting black soot into the lungs of their child occupants. As a result, studies have shown that electric school buses reduce sick days, improving student health and attendance.
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![Day 1 of the Electrek Formula Sun Grand Prix 2025 [Gallery]](https://i0.wp.com/electrek.co/wp-content/uploads/sites/3/2025/07/54629423281_6315c46dff_k.jpg?resize=1200,628&quality=82&strip=all&ssl=1)
Today was the official start of racing at the Electrek Formula Sun Grand Prix 2025! There was a tremendous energy (and heat) on the ground at NCM Motorsports Park as nearly a dozen teams took to the track. Currently, as of writing, Stanford is ranked #1 in the SOV (Single-Occupant Vehicle) class with 68 registered laps. However, the fastest lap so far belongs to UC Berkeley, which clocked a 4:45 on the 3.15-mile track. That’s an average speed of just under 40 mph on nothing but solar energy. Not bad!
In the MOV (Multi-Occupant Vehicle) class, Polytechnique Montréal is narrowly ahead of Appalachian State by just 4 laps. At last year’s formula sun race, Polytechnique Montréal took first place overall in this class, and the team hopes to repeat that success. It’s still too early for prediction though, and anything can happen between now and the final day of racing on Saturday.
Congrats to the teams that made it on track today. We look forward to seeing even more out there tomorrow. In the meantime, here are some shots from today via the event’s wonderful photographer Cora Kennedy.
Stay tuned for more!
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The numbers are in and they are all bad for Tesla fans – the company sold just 5,000 Cybertruck models in Q4 of 2025, and built some 30% more “other” vehicles than it delivered. It just gets worse and worse, on today’s tension-building episode of Quick Charge!
We’ve also got day 1 coverage of the 2025 Electrek Formula Sun Grand Prix, reports that the Tesla Optimus program is in chaos after its chief engineer jumps ship, and a look ahead at the fresh new Hyundai IONIQ 2 set to bow early next year, thanks to some battery specs from the Kia EV2.
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Tesla has launched its new Oasis Supercharger, the long-promised EV charging station of the future, with a solar farm and off-grid batteries.
Early in the deployment of the Supercharger network, Tesla promised to add solar arrays and batteries to the Supercharger stations, and CEO Elon Musk even said that most stations would be able to operate off-grid.
While Tesla did add solar and batteries to a few stations, the vast majority of them don’t have their own power system or have only minimal solar canopies.
Back in 2016, I asked Musk about this, and he said that it would now happen as Tesla had the “pieces now in place” with Supercharger V3, Powerpack V2, and SolarCity:
All of these pieces have been in place for years, and Tesla has now discontinued the Powerpack in favor of the Megapack. The Supercharger network is also transitioning to V4 stations.
Yet, solar and battery deployment haven’t accelerated much in the decade since Musk made that comment, but it is finally happening.
Last year, Tesla announced a new project called ‘Oasis’, which consists of a new model Supercharger station with a solar farm and battery storage enabling off-grid operations in Lost Hills, California.
Tesla has now unveiled the project and turned on most of the Supercharger stalls:
The project consists of 168 chargers, with half of them currently operational, making it one of the largest Supercharger stations in the world. However, that’s not even the most notable aspect of it.
The station is equipped with 11 MW of ground-mounted solar panels and canopies, spanning 30 acres of land, and 10 Tesla Megapacks with a total energy storage capacity of 39 MWh.
It can be operated off-grid, which is the case right now, according to Tesla.
With off-grid operations, Tesla was about to bring 84 stalls online just in time for the Fourth of July travel weekend. The rest of the stalls and a lounge are going to open later this year.
Electrek’s Take
This is awesome. A bit late, but awesome. This is what charging stations should be like: fully powered by renewable energy.
Unfortunately, it will be much harder to open those stations in the future due to legislation that Trump and the Republican Party have just passed, which removes incentives for solar and energy storage, adds taxes on them, and removes incentives to build batteries – all things that have helped Tesla considerably over the last few years.
The US is likely going to have a few tough years for EV adoption and renewable energy deployment.
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