Zion becomes first national park with an all-electric shuttle bus service
Zion National Park’s shuttle fleet has become one of the first bus fleets in the US to go all electric, and the first at a National Park.
Zion National Park in Southern Utah is renowned for its colorful canyons and arches, and is one of the “mighty five” national parks in the region showing off Utah’s natural beauty.
The park, which is largely situated around a narrow canyon, started getting more and more visitors in the 1990s, leading to traffic issues. This led the park to close off most park roads to private traffic, and institute a shuttle system to bring visitors through the canyon and back and forth from the town of Springdale just outside the park.
Those buses went into service in 2000, and helped to revitalize the park by reducing noise and pollution from traffic, which are always a scourge in beautiful natural areas.
“The remarks we got from visitors in the very first summer were fantastic. They said, ‘You have given us back the canyon.’ They said, ‘We can hear the birds sing and the air is fresh.’ No longer were the traffic jams fouling the air, impacting the soundscape, and diminishing the visitor experience.”
Jeff Bradybaugh, Zion National Park Superintendent
However, those buses ran on propane, so they were still noisy and contribute to the degradation of natural environments due to their use of fossil fuels.
Now, Zion has upgraded its entire fleet to all-electric buses, rather than the previous propane buses, becoming the first fleet at any National Park to do so.
The fleet includes 30 all-electric buses to replace the 39 previous propane buses. The new buses are more spacious, quieter, and include air conditioning and better disability accommodations, which the previous buses did not have.
Best of all, they’re also more efficient, and therefore contribute less to the climate change that has made Zion’s summer days hotter and hotter (as humans apparently refuse to stop poisoning the only home we have).
The fleet’s full conversion was announced this week, but the buses have already been operating and shuttling visitors. Over Labor Day weekend, they shuttled 97,000 riders through the park – saving a huge amount of car trips, exhaust, and noise that would have otherwise been required. Zion says each shuttle replaces 29 cars on its roads.
The buses were largely funded by the US Department of Transportation through a grant program for nationally significant federal lands.
While this is the first National Park bus fleet to go all-electric, the National Park Service is working to transition other large bus fleets, like those at Grand Canyon, Acadia, Yosemite, Bryce Canyon, and Harpers Ferry, to all-electric buses. This is all part of the Biden-Harris administration’s commitment to shift the entire federal fleet to electric vehicles.
And Zion hopes that it can serve as a role model for other bus fleets, whether federal or otherwise, and show how successful an all-electric bus fleet can be at reducing both air and noise pollution. “This is the state-of-the-art electric bus fleet in the country. It is going to set a standard for other national parks” said Robin Carnahan, administrator of the General Services Administration.
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Tesla has reportedly yet to start testing its robotaxi service in Austin without a safety driver behind the wheel – just weeks before the planned launch.
For months now, Tesla and CEO Elon Musk have been hyping the launch of “Tesla Robotaxi”, a Uber-like ride-hailing service powered by autonomous Tesla vehicles, starting with a launch in Austin, Texas in June.
We have extensively reported that this launch is disappointing compared to what Tesla promised for years: that all its consumer vehicles built since 2016 are capable of self-driving.
Instead, Tesla plans to build an internal fleet of “10-20” Model Ys and have them offer ride-hailing services in a geo-fenced area around Austin, Texas, helped by human teleoperations. This is very similar to what Waymo has been offering in other cities for years, specifically in Austin, for months now.
Even with the significant downgrade in self-driving capabilities promised with this project, there are many doubts about Tesla’s ability to achieve the lesser goal.
That’s because the robotaxi service will be based on Tesla’s ‘Supervised Full Self-Driving’ program, which is currently achieving about 500 miles between critical disengagements fleet-wide, according to the latest crowdsourced data.
Tesla will be able to improve on that by optimizing a version for the geo-fenced area in Austin and it has been training its neural nets for that for months with vehicles going around Austin.
However, a new report now claims that Tesla has yet to start testing its service without safety drivers at the wheel – similar to Tesla’s public ‘Supervised FSD’. The Information wrote in a new report:
Elon Musk’s deadline for launching Tesla’s first robotaxi service, in Austin, Texas, is weeks away, but the company hadn’t started testing its cars without a human safety driver as of last month, according to an engineer close to the testing and a former employee. That’s a crucial step required before Tesla can launch the pilot service for customers.
For comparison, before launching its paid ride service in Austin, Waymo tested its vehicles with safety drivers in the area for 6 months and then without safety drivers for another 6 months.
Waymo has now taken over a significant market share of ride-hailing rides in the Texas capital, but it still has limitations; for example, it doesn’t drive on the interstate.
The report also mentions that Tesla has been working with local emergency services in Austin to develop intervention plans in order to avoid causing issues if its autonomous vehicles fail.
Electrek’s Take
This is the biggest softball goal. It’s a fraction of what was promised, it’s something that others have achieved before. It’s a punt created for Tesla to finally get a “win” in self-driving.
If they can’t even make it, it would be disastrous, but at least, I hope that it will finally open the eyes of many Tesla shareholders to the reality that Tesla is actually behind in autonomous driving and that Musk’s latest claims that Tesla will have “millions of robotaxi on the road” in 2026 are just the same as when he claimed it would happen in 2025, 2024, 2023, 2022, 2021, 2020, and 2019: corporate puffery.
My main concern now is for public safety. I have little hope of US regulators being able to stop Tesla considering Trump is firing anyone who got in Musk’s way after he gave him over $250 million.
If Tesla brings its cowboy approach to this, it could get bad quickly.
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The development of Rivian’s R2 validation builds continues to progress. We know so because the American automaker’s founder and CEO, RJ Scaringe, continues to pepper us with welcome updates with plenty of fantastic images. The latest post features the inner workings of Rivian’s Maximus drive unit, which will propel the upcoming R2 EVs when they hit the market next year.
Another day, another exciting social media update from RJ Scaringe. Nine days ago, the Rivian CEO shared a peek at the company’s new Maximus drive unit, designed to be more compact and efficiently built to help reduce cost-per-unit production.
Our only look was from outside the drive unit’s casing at the time, but it was exciting news nonetheless. As an encore, Scaringe posted photos of the R2 validation builds on a pilot line at the automaker’s facility in Normal, Illinois.
This evening, Scaringe took to Instagram and X once again to share a better look at the inner workings of the Rivian Maximus drive unit. Check it out:
RJ shares more images of Rivian’s Maximus development
Rivian’s CEO posted the three images above, which showcase some interesting perspectives of the developing drive unit. As previously shared by Rivian, Maximus uses a new continuous winding technique that reduces the total welds per stator and thus the total overall cost of building each one.
For comparison, Rivian’s current Enduro drive unit requires 264 stator welds, while Maximus only needs 24. You can see the stator windings in the image above to the left. Scaringe shared excitement in the progress of the Rivian team’s Maximus drive unit as well as some insight in his post:
I love the packaging on Maximus — the drive unit for R2. It has a side mounted inverter that utilizes flat area at the end of the motor to minimize the length of bus bars, keeping them light and efficient. The large planar shape also allows all processing and power electronics to exist on a single printed circuit board.
The inverter chassis closes out the oil cooled motor cavity and seamlessly routes coolant from the power modules to the drive unit’s heat exchanger with no extra parts.
Overall, the inverter part count is reduced by 41% relative to Enduro and structural inverter lid saves more parts and fasteners by also serving as the drive unit mount. I love this design efficiency. (heart emoji)
Looks fantastic, RJ. We can’t wait to see the visual progress of the R2 you share next!
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On today’s thrilling episode of Quick Charge, we’ve a huge spike in global EV sales and a huge dip in Tesla deliveries. Plus a whole bunch of news from Toyota, including an updated bZ that’s just a bit better than before … but is a bit better going to make a big difference?
We’re also on track for more than 1 in 4 new cars sold this year to be electric, with a whole lot more hybrids coming in to make up the difference and drive fuel demand down to a new yearly low. All this, plus the top 5 cheapest EVs to insure when you hit the play button.
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