Battery Drain: MTA Trims New Flyer Electric Bus Order Amid Tech Growing Pains
The MTA will buy 85 fewer electric buses than planned and swap them with diesel-electric hybrids while its manufacturer sorts out why its 60 e-buses already on the road can’t last a full day of service.
MTA board members on Monday advanced an amendment to the authority’s 2024 contract with bus manufacturer New Flyer that lowers the number of e-buses in the order from 380 40-foot e-buses to 295, and swaps in 85 diesel-electric hybrids in their stead.
The buses are expected to arrived between April and December of 2028 — , officials said, three years after the MTA was supposed to begin accepting orders of the battery-electric buses.
The MTA’s 60-vehicle electric bus fleet has so far failed to provide reliable service due to a laundry list of mechanical and technological issues. New Flyer has pledged to make modifications to address those issues, transit officials said.
“Our lesson from this experience is that we must set some framework for evaluating the performance of propulsion before we go all in,” Jessie Lazarus, the MTA’s head of rolling stock procurement, told the committee on Monday. “We had 500 spots for battery-electric buses that didn’t really pan out, and so we have to catch up with our net new bus deliveries.”
MTA officials briefed the board in June on the problems plaguing the five dozen electric buses the authority currently has in service, which last just 2,500 miles on the road on average before a mechanical breakdown takes them out of service, compared to 8,500 miles for diesel buses.
Officials have previously sounded the alarm in 2025 that the batteries that power the buses overheat or fail hold a full day’s charge, and that electric components that power systems like the air brakes were failing while buses were in service.
The agency faces twin pressures on the electric bus front. State law mandates that it have a 100-percent zero-emissions bus fleet by the end of 2040, and the MTA has made buying new electric buses a centerpiece project funded by congestion pricing tolls.
But the U.S. bus manufacturing industry has failed to deliver reliable buses across the country, and federal “Buy America” requirements make it impossible to use federal grants to buy buses from European or Asian manufacturers who don’t have factories in America.
A lack of reliable electric buses leaves the MTA in the tough position of trying to replenish its fleet while also meeting the zero-emissions mandate. Buses have a recommended service life of 12 years — forcing the MTA to choose between substandard e-vehicles that can’t stay on the road and older, malfunctioning buses.
The contract modification does not that electric buses technology appears to be improving. MTA officials made the case that punting on the current order will allow them to keep the bus fleet up-to-date while working with New Flyer to work out the kinks with the buses.
“Making the proposed contract modifications now will position the MTA to obtain assurance that the [battery-electric buses] can meet our performance requirements before issuing notice to proceed for a larger quantity,” MTA officials wrote in the official modification document set for an MTA vote on Wednesday. “These modifications enable the MTA to support the maturing of the [battery-electric bus] industry generally and New Flyer specifically, such that the MTA is able to achieve its sustainability goals while simultaneously reducing overall implementation costs, maintaining good service and improving customer experience.”
The MTA’s pledge to work with New Flyer notwithstanding, agency leadership has talked about using its financial muscle and its plans to order thousands of new buses to bend the domestic bus manufacturing industry to their will.
Beyond bus manufacturers, the domestic industry needs more companies that build parts like batteries, the MTA said. Lazarus’s team has been kicking around how to bring more of that manufacturing muscle to the U.S. and New York state in particular.
“We’re using the capital program dollars to make sure that our acquisitions for new rolling stock are actually greater than the sum of its parts,” she told board members on Monday, “We want to make sure that we’re helping to bolster the industrial policies that support rolling stock manufacturing, and buses, in particular.”
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