President Biden to encourage manufacturing of electric vehicles by virtual tour at South Carolina plant

As the White House hypes Biden’s plan to boost manufacturing of zero-emission cars and buses, President Biden will virtually tour the manufacturing plant in South Carolina, which manufactures electric bus and battery.

In his $2.3 trillion jobs plan, he has proposed to spend $20 billion in converting at least 25% of school buses into electric buses and $25 billion to electrify some transit vehicles. Out of his total proposal of $174 billion for electric vehicles, he included $100 billion for consumer rebates.

The move to electrify vehicles comes after China has dominated the world electric bus market. Biden plans to tour U.S. electrical bus manufacturer Proterra facility, which estimates that by 2025 50% of all North-American electrical buses will be built by them.

The U.S. has over 475,000 school buses and 65,000 transit buses and most of them will run on diesel, as per the White House. Biden has made a “commitment” that all American-built buses will be zero-emission by 2030 but it is not clear if he will ban the sale of non-zero emission buses.

Vice President, Kamala Harris, toured Thomas Built Buses facility in North Carolina to push manufacturing of electric buses.

Proterra, based in California, was founded by Dale Hill, mechanical engineer, in Colorado in 2004. The manufacturing plant has provided hundreds of public transport buses to the U.S.

Proterra with a merger with ArcLight Clean Transition Corp has decided to go public in January, in a deal of $1.6 billion, including debt.