School bus manufacturing leadership has seen a flurry of activity over the past six months. True to form, Thomas Built Buses looked within the Daimler Truck North America family for its next president and CEO to succeed Kevin Bangston, who now leads Daimler Truck Financial Services. T.J. Reed got his start at Daimler Truck in September 1998 and has spent 19 years total with the company, and nearly another six years spent at Meritor heading its global electrification as well as front drive train businesses. He was tapped in October to lead Thomas.
“It feels like five, six years already, and that’s been a good thing,” he told School Transportation News last month. “Early on, I had my first trade shows. I was blown away [by] how the entire industry was really on the same page, not only the camaraderie and the spirit of working together [but] on a common mission. But it was OE’s, suppliers, districts, contractors really just loving what they do and being passionate about school buses. That’s rubbed off. And you can’t help but feel that when you’re in High Point at Thomas.”
Thomas would not comment on potential tariff impact, but the American Trucking Associations’ outlook is a potential price increases of up to $35,000 for a heavy-duty truck, granted those are made in Mexico whereas Thomas is not.
Meanwhile, Reed said employees are “pumping out” high-quality school buses every single day and benefitting from increased investment to accomplish the job. In July, the manufacturer announced its new Saf-T-Liner HDX2 school bus and moving production to the C2 SafT-Liner plant in Archdale, North Carolina, for increased efficiency and quality.
He also discussed the HDX2 as well as efficiency improvements to the second-generation Jouley electric school bus, the continued role of diesel, and more.
The following transcript was edited for clarity and space.
STN: Talk about why Thomas chose the Accelera e-axle to power the latest Jouley.
TJ Reed: I think the biggest thing, Ryan, and when you look at it, I would say the technical concept or the promise of an e-axle is you’re not only increasing performance from an efficiency perspective, you’re lowering the weight, you’re improving packaging. It’s ideally suited for school bus, even a last mile item. If you think about it, you’re taking a lot of components that are inside the frame rails that add a lot of weight, and you’re basically collapsing it down inside the housing of a carrier. And you got your traditional axle, you’ve got your motor and your transmission all in a compact space, and
that frees up a lot of room for batteries to be placed in between the rails, and you can shorten the wheelbase. That had been some of the challenges with the early generations. You were pretty restricted on the variation of the product. And as we know, school buses are pretty custom. So, this just opens up a lot of flexibility. And the other great thing is this continued maturity of components. The product’s been out in the market for a while, been operating in a heavy-truck configuration. We know it’ll live in the life cycle and certainly Cummins/Accelera is a great partner. They have a lot of resources and know-how. All those things come together. It could be just a much better experience for the districts and the bus operators. Just another step in the progression. This is great to see it come to market now.
STN: We have seen some electric school bus market consolidation recently. What is Thomas’ perspective on ramping up production to meet demand? How is Thomas positioning itself to meet that demand?
Reed: It’s a long-term play. As we like to say, we’re leading with the long view. At the end of day, school bus is the ideal duty cycle when you got majority of ranges under 100 miles a day. You’ve got overnight charging in the depot. You’ve got a lot of stop and go for regenerative braking. It’s ideally set so that it is specific to school buses. But you know, part of Daimler, globally we serve markets all around the world and want to lead in this space. With that, we work with a lot of different partners, from battery partners, drive systems, accessories, financial services. It’s a significant investment for our dealers as well. [Daimler has] continued to invest, like in the Greenlane [charging station joint venture]. Those things take time to put in place, and you don’t make investments on short-term plays. This is a long-term play, and this is an area that we think is going to be not only the right thing to do for our environment, for our communities, but it’s going to be the right long-term play for our customers from an efficiency and certainly from a health and community perspective, especially on school buses.
That’s why it’s important we have what I would call our core business based upon internal combustion engines. That generates the cash flow that allows us to invest in a lot of this technology. We’ve got, I would say, that very phased approach, where we install, we learn, we adapt, we perfect, we continue to move forward. That’s not only just with us, that’s with our customers, as we learn how to put these new vehicles in applications that they hadn’t been in before. We’ve been doing internal combustion engines for over 100 years, and that was always changing and evolving. So, there’s nothing different here. But it’s nice, too, from a Daimler perspective, we have the global toolbox, that know-how. There are components and systems that we can use that work for us in a school bus application, some that don’t. So, we have that optionality to really work with a lot of different partners, including ourselves. That gives us a lot of capability.
STN: We’ll get back to diesel in a moment. Obviously, range is a challenge with electric school buses. But infrastructure has been named by many as the biggest challenge to adoption and scalability. Does that continue to be the number one obstacle? Are there others?
Reed: We have a kind of famous calculation that we always talk about in the marketplace. You’ve got to have infrastructure readiness. You’ve got to have a vehicle that’s ready. Then, you’ve got to have basically the economics from a TCO of operation. If any one of those factors is zero, the calculation is zero. And certainly, we’re still in the very early days of infrastructure. So, for us to get to the point where we’re going to start to scale and see higher volumes, we’ve got to have infrastructure certainly coming in at a much greater pace. That’s not just only for school buses, that’s commercial vehicles, that’s passenger cars, that’s everything, in general. I think that theme hasn’t changed. We’ve seen investment, we’ve seen partnerships, but those need to continue to scale up. Then the second part of the equation is, we ’ve got the vehicles. They’re ready. They’re performing in the market today, and they’re getting better and better every day. And as they do that, that’s going to increase volume. As volume increases, that’s going to start to bring the cost down to help with the TCO parity. All those three things need to line up, and infrastructure remains the biggest challenge, not just in the school bus industry but really across the board.
STN: What role has the EPA Clean School Bus Program played in terms of pricing electric school buses compared to supply chain congestion?
Reed: There’s certainly circular logic when it comes to supply and demand in how that impacts costs. I would say this, from a technology development what we’re looking to do in our longterm plans [is] for component systems that drive down costs, that are getting, I would say better performance, more range. The reality is, in the near-term, those are still very low volume systems, and you know that at the end day that battery-electric
vehicles will be significantly more expensive than internal combustion engines from a
scale perspective. There was the [viewpoint] that battery cell cost was going to start to come down, and then you really saw the supply chain crunch… I would say commodities that go into battery development spiked. So, prices went up. We were dealing with that. And now, too, it is absolutely true in these early days [that] funding is critically important to kind of drive the early development of those early adopters. And as that either steps down or is removed, then the cost obviously goes up, and that then kind of lowers volume. I wouldn’t say it’s going to stop our progress, but it will certainly have an impact and slow it. But again, we see it as a long-term view, that it’s not an if, it’s a when. Now that one, I can’t tell you, but it’s still a situation where we probably got to have the infrastructure coming back in. There’s got to be some level of subsidies for that. In the meantime, we’re all working in unison to bring better technology to market at a lower cost, so that takes time to do, collectively.
STN: We’ve also seen an industry trend toward bigger electric school buses. Do you have any plans that you’re willing to talk about as to an eventual electric HDX2?
Reed: I’ll foreshadow this. Some great news is coming. But what I would tell you is we absolutely see the need in the market. We absolutely see the need in our product portfolio, and we have some great solutions, so stay tuned.
STN: Daimler Trucks North American recently added investment into Detroit Diesel, and the California Air Resources Board ceased seeking additional federal waivers to fully implement its Advanced Clean Trucks (ACT) rule for heavy-duty trucks. How do these developments impact the school bus market?
Reed: The Detroit Diesel investment, that’s more for our heavy-duty products, more on the truck side. Everything that we do on the school bus is medium range. That’s Cummins, our partner there. When you look at that, just in terms of diesel, we believe you need all types because the applications are so vast, that the use cases are so different that you need a lot of different technologies to drive to zero emissions. Diesel has a critical role to play. And you’re right, with a lot of investment not only by us in our proprietary engines but our partners from Cummins and our competitors as well, it is continuing to lower emissions. You’ve got GHG phase three that will be coming in 2027. There’s additional tailpipe reductions. All those are being engineered into our buses now. I mean significantly lower NOx and particulate matter, even over the last 10 years. These are much cleaner running engines today. There are requirements, yes, for the ACT rule, where in some states, in order to be able to sell internal combustion engines, you have to have a certain number of battery electric. But that’s been, I would say, one of the success stories of the Clean School Bus Program. It’s seeded enough diesel capability or opportunity in some of these states, we haven’t had an issue with that. Diesel is going to continue to play a role as well as other modes of propulsion. We’re invested in all.
STN: And in terms of gasoline or octane, Thomas is also coming out with an option provided by Cummins in 2026 or 2027.
Reed: We’re making investments across different modes of propulsion, different emissions technologies. You’ve got to have answers for all your customers, no matter what their duty cycle is. And octane, you know, gasoline will play a big role for that. We’re excited about that as well.
STN: Thank you
Editor’s Note: As reprinted in the March 2025 issue of School Transportation News.
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