Blue Bird just delivered its 2,000th electric school bus

In a major milestone, Blue Bird (Nasdaq: BLBD) has delivered its 2,000th electric school bus to Clark County School District (CCSD) in Nevada.

CCSD gets its first electric school bus

CCSD is the US’s fifth-largest school district. It operates 373 schools serving more than 300,000 students. The district maintains a bus fleet of more than 1,900 vehicles, and it transports over 123,000 students each school day on more than 1,400 bus routes.

The school district has taken delivery of Blue Bird’s All-American RE model, which has a 155 kWh Li-ION NMC/ G cell battery, a 120-mile range and can carry 84 students. It’s powered by the electric PowerDrive 7000 system from Accelera by Cummins. The bus can be charged overnight, taking between three and eight hours to recharge fully.

A second electric bus purchased through a grant from the Clark County Division of Air Quality is currently in the inspection process and is expected to be on the road in early 2025. CCSD also received a $9.875 million grant through the EPA’s Clean School Bus Program to purchase electric school buses, and it’s currently purchasing an additional 25 electric school buses and EV charging infrastructure with the some of the grant money.

This Clean School Bus Program is part of the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law that provides a total of $5 billion over five years for electric school bus transportation across the US.

Britton Smith, president at Blue Bird Corporation, said, “Local, state, and federal funding for clean school buses remains at a historic high. Above all, we applaud the EPA’s Clean School Bus Program for accelerating the adoption of zero-emission student transportation nationwide and for helping to usher in an unprecedented era of technology innovation.”

CCSD’s milestone unit is now one of more than 2,000 Blue Bird electric school buses serving school districts across 41 US states and four Canadian provinces. Replacing 2,000 diesel-powered school buses with 2,000 electric buses reduces carbon emissions by more than 21,000 metric tons annually. That means nearly 150,000 students a day are no longer exposed to diesel tailpipe emissions linked to health issues such as asthma or heart disease.

In 2023, Blue Bird opened a 40,000-square-foot EV production center in Fort Valley, Georgia, and it continues to expand production. The US Department of Energy recently chose Blue Bird to receive an $80 million grant to convert a former manufacturing site for diesel-powered motorhomes into an approximately 600,00-square-foot EV manufacturing factory, which will enable the company to boost its long-term production capacity to more than 5,000 electric school buses annually.

Electrek’s Take

This is a really cool milestone. But then you remember that Clark County alone runs 1,900 school buses and that it, and the country at large, has a really long way to go to get kids out of diesel school buses. So Blue Bird’s expanded production capacity can’t come online fast enough, and hopefully, Clark County will spend that nearly $10 million to roll out its bus program fast.

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