From the EV manufacturer’s perspective, I imagine it’s likely easier to convince 1 “transportation manager” in your example to buy 50 school busses (single purpose vehicles) compared to convincing 50 consumers to buy 50 EVs each user with different driving patterns/needs. Likely also easier and cheaper to do maintenance on a 50 school bus fleet compared to maintenance for 50 individual consumer cars.
The business case can be well defined as expressed in your example, which makes solving for that problem easier. Selling en mass to the general public is a harder feat for an EV startup IMO
Tesla took the route of selling low volume luxury and then went down market. Seems like Rivian is taking a strategy of special purpose fleet vehicles (and I imagine eventually broadening their focus to consumers) - both are pretty smart business approaches to growth IMO
At the same time, anyone buying a fleet is expecting a discount for bulk. So the margin is thinner.
It is, for example, how airplanes have been so competitive despite there effectively being a duopoly. Pretty much no one is buying an airliner at list price.
School buses are a niche where everyone is buying about the amount of the same product from the same manufactures. You don't really get bulk discounts other than the same discount everyone else gets.
I don't think anyone buys them, period. They lease them. When the lease is up, they are re-leased or maybe sold to second-hand leasing companies or second-tier airlines, and ultimately they end up as freighters or scrapped.
The last of the DC-10s/MD-11s only recently ended service with FedEx. They may actually still be flying some MD-11s.
If you’re leasing it’s not for free, the lessor is charging you a premium to make a profit over what they’re spending, so it still makes sense to own, particularly for large, heavily utilized fleets that don’t scale down much.
The business case can be well defined as expressed in your example, which makes solving for that problem easier. Selling en mass to the general public is a harder feat for an EV startup IMO
Tesla took the route of selling low volume luxury and then went down market. Seems like Rivian is taking a strategy of special purpose fleet vehicles (and I imagine eventually broadening their focus to consumers) - both are pretty smart business approaches to growth IMO