We are now a good few years into the EV bus transition in the UK, and having worked on some of the pilot and early projects it's interesting to hear the operators thoughts now, a few years later. And no1 on the list is "reliability" especially due to the lack of having a transmission and having regen!
An Urban bus is, fairly obviously, stopping and starting a lot, and spends most of its time in low gears, and braking to a halt, especially if the driver wants to not hold up other traffic by coasting down to a stop.
When we look at transmissions, they get an absolute kicking, especially as wear means backlash, and then the engine torque gets applied with a bang, that then stresses everything else. lets face it, few of our bus journeys on derv busses can honestly be described as smooth, even with the modern multi-ratio automatic trans models.
So, with no gears to shift, and the ability to smoothly and rapidly stop, what operators seem to be reporting is an absolutely massively reduced maintance burden and much higher fleet reliability and "up time"
This adds to a lower running cost, and makes operators and passengers happy