Every weekday, 10 commuter buses owned by biotech company Genentech join the ranks of the over 1,000 private buses that shuttle employees across the San Francisco Bay Area from near their homes to and from corporate campuses. Genentech’s buses look mostly like all the others (between 35 and 45 feet long), and they come complete with perks that Bay Area riders have become accustomed to such as Wi-Fi and electric power outlets. But they also have one particularly unique internal feature: They’re powered by batteries.
Genentech has been running electric commuter buses made by electric bus maker BYD to transport commuting employees — from as far as Vacaville and San Jose — to its headquarters in South San Francisco since the summer of 2018. This month, the company will receive 11 more electric buses and is planning to add another 10 by the end of the year, the company tells GreenBiz. That means that by the end of 2020, close to half of Genentech’s more than 60 commuter buses, called GenenBuses, will be electric.
With the rapid emergence of electric transit buses, combined with tech companies’ wealth and aggressive sustainability goals, you’d think that electric commuter shuttles such as Genentech’s would be all the rage in Silicon Valley. But the biotech company, a division of Swiss pharmaceutical giant Roche, was the first Bay Area employer to put a sizable amount of electric commuter shuttle buses, running long ranges, on the roads.
The market for electric commuter shuttle buses is nascent, thanks to a combination of a lack of available models and batteries that only recently have reached a low-enough cost and long-enough range to move a bus for at least 200 miles on a single charge. The economics for electric buses are about “two to three years behind the economics you’re seeing in the passenger electric vehicle segment,” said Colin McKerracher, head of advanced transport at Bloomberg New Energy Finance (BNEF).
And unlike California’s mandate that says all public transit buses in the state must be zero-emission by 2040, private companies are driven by sustainability goals and employee retention, not regulation. Although later this year, the California Air Resources Board (CARB) likely will finalize the Advanced Clean Trucks rules, which eventually could call for owners of heavy-duty commercial vehicles to adopt zero-emissions vehicles.