Enlarge / GreenPower has given its class-D electric school bus a big battery bump. (credit: GreenPower)

On Tuesday morning, the West Virginia-based GreenPower Motor Company debuted its latest electric vehicle. It’s the newest version of its class-D electric school bus, now fitted with a great big battery to give the big yellow bus the kind of range it needs for longer routes.

GreenPower has been building electric buses for almost a decade now, and in 2019 it delivered the first BEAST buses (it stands for Battery Electric Automotive School Transportation) to a school district in California. More recently, GreenPower has been testing its buses in real world conditions, conducting a nine-month pilot program in West Virginia that split its time across 18 different school districts (for six weeks each), clocking up more than 32,000 miles (51,500 km) in the process.

“We found that in ideal conditions, so not a real cold morning or anything like that, but the bus was getting between 1.4 and 1.5 [miles] to 1 percent state of charge. So that means that your range on 100 percent state of charge is in that 140 to 150 mile range,” explained Mark Nestle, vice president of business development and strategy at GreenPower.