One of the greatest applications for present-day electric vehicle technology is buses. School buses and transit buses run defined routes that are within the range limits of EVs, and it’s always positive when passengers don’t huff diesel fumes. Unfortunately, Vermont’s Green Mountain Transit hasn’t been feeling those benefits because its New Flyer XE40 buses have been a total nightmare. These buses currently can’t be used in the winter because they cannot charge under 41 degrees, and they can’t charge inside due to fire risk. This seems like a failure on EVs, but it isn’t. Let’s dig into this.
Green Mountain Transit, known as GMT, provides public transit to the people of northern Vermont. Like many transit operations, GMT is interested in electrification. In theory, an electrified bus can be cheaper to run over time while also emitting less emissions than a pure internal combustion-powered bus. A fully-electric bus, specifically, doesn’t have diesel emissions equipment that can fail, engine oil that needs to be changed, or filters that need to be swapped out. Again, in theory, an electric bus is one of those things where everyone wins. Not everyone is like me and enjoys sniffing diesel fumes.
GMT kicked off its electrification initiative with the acquisition of two Proterra Catalyst BE40 electric transit buses. These buses had proven themselves enough that in 2024, GMT ordered five more electric buses. These new orders were New Flyer XE40 electric buses from Canada. Reportedly, GMT spent $8 million on these buses through mostly federal government and Volkswagen Dieselgate settlement funds.
Unfortunately, Green Mountain Transit’s buses haven’t lived up to their promises. In November 2025, less than a year after they were put into service, the five New Flyer buses were sidelined due to a battery recall. As it currently stands, the buses cannot charge at temperatures under 41 degrees, and since the defective batteries have a fire risk, they cannot charge inside a building, either.
Some folks are understandably fired up about this. A fair number of political news outlets have covered this story, but with a bizarre angle. There is a real and big issue going on in Vermont, but the blame is being unfairly leveled at electric vehicles. These buses do appear to be piles of crap, but it’s not because they’re electric or because it’s cold outside, as these outlets are claiming.
Electric Buses Aren’t New
If you’re not aware of your American geography, Vermont, which is a part of New England, is a pretty cold place. The northern part of Vermont, where GMT operates, is known for its heavy snowfall and blisteringly cold temperatures that sometimes get as low as the single digits. This is part of what has fueled the weird coverage about the failures of these buses. The implication made by some publications seems to be that electric vehicles don’t work in the winter.
However, there are electric buses running in the real world that work fine.
Back in 2021, I reported how the Tok School in Alaska runs a 2020 Thomas Built Saf-T-Liner C2 Jouley in the dead of winter. That bus made headlines because it was so reliable that it didn’t miss a single day of school, even when it picked up kids in -40 degree temperatures. According to Tok Transportation’s co-owner, Gerald Blackard, when it was 40 degrees below zero, the bus used a little more than half of its battery charge to keep the interior at 45 degrees Fahrenheit. Driving the bus in the same temperature used a little more than 40 percent of the battery. On a warm day, the bus has up to a 138-mile range. That’s great for a school bus, considering that the average school bus in America runs only 31.73 miles per driver shift. It’s just one example of EV buses working in the cold just fine.
Vermont has been running electric buses since before GMT picked up its New Flyers. When the state of Vermont received its settlement money from the Volkswagen Dieselgate scandal, it decided to invest that money into electric transit buses and electric school buses. That project kicked off in the summer of 2019. In 2023, the Department of Environmental Conservation published a 387-page report detailing what happened with the electric school buses and transit buses deployed across the state. If you have a lot of time, feel free to read it. Otherwise, I’ll zoom in on the findings for the transit buses:
As transit buses, the MVRTD electric Gilligs run mostly during daylight hours and experience average route temperatures slightly higher than school buses which travel exclusively in the morning and afternoon. These are also sufficiently more complicated vehicles, which makes it difficult to compare them with school buses. That said, a familiar pattern emerged in the transit bus data.
Figure 16 shows that ambient temperature affected nominal range. Only a few data points were captured on the colder end of the spectrum. Interestingly, the vehicles appear to have reached their nominal 150 miles of range at ambient temperatures near 45 degrees Fahrenheit. As temperatures rose above 45 degrees Fahrenheit, the buses regularly achieved real-world ranges higher than the nominal 150 miles, often reaching more than 200 miles of range. The linear regressions indicate that the buses generally lost a little less than 1% of range for each degree Fahrenheit of daytime daily average temperature drop.
In short, yes, the buses do perform worse in winter. However, the buses were still usable for their jobs, and Vermont clearly believed that buying more of them was a good idea. There’s even a bus manufacturer in Canada that specifically makes buses for cold-weather operation. One of them was even sent to Vermont. It’s also notable that the two electric transit buses from Proterra, which do run in the cold, are not included in this big headache.
Alright, so if electric buses work, why are Vermont’s New Flyers such a big fail?
The New Flyers Fall
On February 7, Vermont’s the Center Square published an article titled “Vermont EV buses prove unreliable for transportation this winter.” This story has taken off like wildfire and has been covered by all sorts of political publications. The story comes out swinging:
Electric buses are proving unreliable this winter for Vermont’s Green Mountain Transit, as it needs to be over 41 degrees for the buses to charge, but due to a battery recall the buses are a fire hazard and can’t be charged in a garage.
Spokesman for energy workers advocacy group Power the Future Larry Behrens told the Center Square: “Taxpayers were sold an $8 million ‘solution’ that can’t operate in cold weather when the home for these buses is in New England.” “We’re beyond the point where this looks like incompetence and starts to smell like fraud,” Behrens said. “When government rushes money out the door to satisfy green mandates, basic questions about performance, safety, and value for taxpayers are always pushed aside,” Behrens said. “Americans deserve to know who approved this purchase and why the red flags were ignored.”
Here’s a news report from WCAX-TV about this issue:
Whoa, that’s huge! What’s going on here?
The five electric buses in question here are New Flyer XE40 units from New Flyer of NFI Group Inc. of Canada, the largest independent manufacturer of buses in North America. The publication misidentifies them as “SE40” buses, which do not exist. Anyway, these buses come from the New Flyer Xcelsior CHARGE NG family of all-electric buses. XE40, in this case, means it’s 40 feet long. GMT’s buses are equipped with 520 kWh battery packs and are rated for 258 miles of range in regular conditions.
The buses themselves are an old design. The New Flyer Xcelsior has been around since 2008 and has been a staple of transit fleets all over America. These buses are available in 35-foot and 40-foot lengths as well as 60-foot articulated buses. New Flyer is also flexible in powertrains, selling them with everything from diesel engines to fuel cells.
The Xcelsior CHARGE NG is New Flyer’s second-generation of electric transit buses, and these are the ones causing a rather large headache for their operators.
These buses utilize a Lithium Manganese Cobalt battery system and Siemens ELFA3 traction motors. The HVAC system, which is mounted in the roof, is all-electric. The bus also has an electric heater, an optional diesel heater, and a charge port that’s interoperable with automotive-style chargers.
What’s interesting is where the batteries are. Modern transit buses are built with a monocoque design and ride really low to the ground. Where do you hide 520 kWh of batteries? They go on the roof!
Something that’s also pretty wild is that New Flyer also developed an on-route charging system that allows the bus to get 6-minute rapid charges while at bus stops.
But for all of these promises, it sounds like New Flyer screwed something up. In September 2025, New Flyer recalled 655 Xcelsior electric buses built from 2021 to 2025 that feature Freudenberg Gen 3 HE (High Energy) batteries. The defect, as noted by New Flyer, is:
New Flyer has decided that a defect which relates to motor vehicle safety exists in certain New Flyer buses equipped with Freudenberg (Freudenberg Battery Power Systems, LLC [Xalt Energy MI, LLC]) Gen 3 High-Energy battery systems. The cells in the high voltage battery system in these vehicles may experience a short circuit or other cell fault posing a risk of fire when battery cells are charged to full, or nearly full, capacity.
Description of the cause:
Cause is short circuit or other cell fault in the high voltage battery cells. Precise cause of the battery cell short circuit is unknown.Identification of any warning that can occur:
If the vehicle is powered on, temperature warnings would be visible on the drivers display. Without the vehicle on, visible smoke from the affected battery may be noticed.
That’s a big yikes. What’s worse is that this wasn’t a precautionary measure. The recall was issued after two buses had smoke emanating from their batteries, and an additional six buses suffered from battery fires.
New Flyer did not issue a Do Not Drive order for the buses. Instead, New Flyer says to park the buses outside in case they catch fire. The company also instructs its customers to charge their buses in a certain way, from the recall:
Interim remedy: Customers are recommended to avoid charging vehicles above a state of charge of 75%, remove buses from the charger once charged and park vehicles outdoors after charging. New Flyer will deploy a vehicle program update to limit the maximum State of Charge (SOC) to 75%, moderately reduce the charging current, and install enhanced post-charge battery monitoring and alert system. The post-charge battery monitoring and alert system will monitor the bus automatically for up to 2 hours after a charging session for any thermal anomalies. If any thermal anomalies are detected, the vehicle will automatically activate its hazard lights and audible buzzers to provide audible and visual alerts to anyone in proximity.
Additionally, New Flyer says to refrain from charging the buses in temperatures below 41 degrees Fahrenheit. New Flyer’s charging systems can handle temperatures down to -40 degrees, but due to this defect and recall, New Flyer doesn’t want its customers charging in winter weather.
This has left Green Mountain Transit in a tough spot. It could charge the buses inside of its warm depot, but the fire risk means that’s not a chance worth taking. But it also can’t charge the buses outside because it’s the middle of winter and temperatures are below 41 degrees.
Now, we return to the Center Square‘s report:
General manager at Green Mountain Transit (GMT) Clayton Clark told The Center Square that “the federal government provides public transit agencies with new buses through a competitive grant application process, and success is not a given.”
“From 2020-2024, the [Federal Transit Administration’s] priority for grants had been low or no emission vehicles, with grant requests for diesel buses often not awarded,” Clark said. “This was part of a concerted effort of the previous administration to accelerate public transits’ migration to replace diesel buses,” Clark said. “To be competitive for a grant, GMT…saw electric battery buses as the pathway to get the most new buses,” Clark said. “Green Mountain Transit’s priority is new buses, regardless of the type.”
Clark informed The Center Square that GMT’s “electric battery buses are 90% paid for by federal and Volkswagen settlement funds.” GMT received five New Flyer SE40 city buses in spring 2025, these buses being a part of “a three year grant cycle for 19 total electric battery buses,” Clark said. “In September 2025 we ordered 7 additional buses with a 2027 delivery date (but will be delivered with different batteries [than the recalled ones]), and 7 more slated for delivery in 2028,” Clark said. “This is the primary source of new buses for the next three years, as we have only 3 diesel buses anticipated.” “Canceling the federal grant for electric bus purchases would result in us losing the grant funds,” Clark said. “It would not give us an opportunity to use the funds differently.”
Sadly, the problems for the transit agencies with these buses might not end anytime soon. GMT indicates that New Flyer will be replacing the batteries in these buses, but the timescale is “within 18-24 months.”
The Center Square‘s piece frames the failure of these buses as a prime example of why EVs are unreliable and, additionally, cannot be trusted in the cold. But to come to this conclusion ignores all of the other times when EVs do work. Green Mountain Transit itself says that these five buses were working just fine until they were recalled. The only reason why the buses are parked is due to a failure on the manufacturer’s part. It wasn’t due to the cold, and it wasn’t specifically because they were EVs. It was because this particular EV is defective.
Let’s put it another way. General Motors is dealing with a huge scandal after nearly 30,000 of its 6.2-liter V8 engines failed. The conclusions being drawn from this bus situation would be like concluding that all V8s are bad because GM screwed up. Instead, the reality is that GM is struggling with that one V8, just like New Flyer seemingly screwed up with this electric bus.
As I said earlier, buses are technically one of the best applications of today’s battery tech. A city bus travels on defined routes, goes back to the same depot every day, and can benefit from regenerative braking and slow speeds. Manufacturers can even just pile on tons of batteries to get a decent working range.
Of course, all of that requires the buses to work right, and that’s the whole problem going on in Vermont. Hopefully, GMT is able to get this sorted out soon enough, because having buses parked, regardless of what powers them, is unfortunate for the people who rely on public transit.
Topshot graphic image: New Flyer
Apparently, New Flyer also makes a version of the bus with A123 batteries instead of the XALT ones, which, I guess l, aren’t affected. I’m assuming government funding rules is what caused them to purchase busses with American batteries vs the Chinese ones
I worked in Burlington, VT during the winter of 1966-7. We got a -25 Degree F morning – I hitchhiked to work.
I live on the NY side of the Vermont border (basically). Single digits has been a good morning these past couple of months. Negative teens has been a regular occurrence.
I still believe in EV buses and EVs as vehicles for specific routes. This particular bus obviously, and unfortunately, is just a POS with POS batteries.
I’m just shocked Stellantis didn’t build these. Maybe they used the same battery supplier.