Electric bus orders stack up as truck cost data undercuts diesel

The newest hard news in electric transport this week is not a bus order. It is a patent and a product date. On 29 September the USPTO granted Tesla patent US 12,746,987 B1 for an "Electric Fan Car," a system that uses four electric ducted fans in the rear diffuser to suck the car onto the road at any speed, according to Electrek.

Tesla filed the application in January 2024, but it traces back to a provisional filing from 17 January 2023. Eight inventors are listed, and all but one are based in the Los Angeles area, where Tesla runs its design studio in Hawthorne. It is the company's second fan car patent in just over a year, Electrek reported, and it lands two weeks before Tesla's latest attempt at a Roadster demo.

What the fan patent actually claims

The drawings show a Model S, the fastback Tesla stopped building in April when it turned the Fremont line over to Optimus. That matters because the Model S can no longer be the production target. The only performance car left in Tesla's pipeline is the Roadster, which is why the patent is being read as a track aero package rather than a sedan feature.

The mechanism itself is straightforward. An inlet on the underbody between the rear wheels feeds a duct that sweeps up to a wide outlet in the rear diffuser. Four axial fans sit side by side in that outlet, split by three vertical strakes. When they spin, they evacuate air under the floor and exhaust it through the rear, creating what Tesla calls a "suction region." The filing argues that passive diffusers limit downforce at low speed and often produce excessive load at high speed, while the fans "can produce a downforce independent of the vehicle velocity." A second version adds two smaller side inlets because the central inlet tends to pull air forward from behind the car instead of from under the floor. Power comes from the same high-voltage pack that drives the wheels.

None of this is new engineering. Chaparral raced the 2J in 1970 with two fans driven by a separate snowmobile engine. Brabham's BT46B won the 1978 Swedish Grand Prix with Niki Lauda and was withdrawn immediately afterwards. Gordon Murray put a 400 mm fan on the back of the T.50 road car, and McMurtry's Spéirling smashed the all-time Goodwood hill climb record in June 2022, about seven months before Tesla filed its provisional.

Volkswagen names its electric Tiguan

The same day, Volkswagen confirmed that its next electric SUV will carry the Tiguan name rather than a numbered ID badge. Following the ID. Polo and ID. Cross, the ID. Tiguan will reach markets in the beginning of 2027, with a world premiere in early October; until then the model continues testing under camouflage wrap, according to a CleanTechnica press release item published on 29 September.

Thomas Schäfer, CEO of the Volkswagen brand and head of the Brand Group Core, said in the release that "more than 8.3 million Tiguan vehicles produced demonstrate the strength and trust associated with this model name." The ID. Tiguan succeeds the ID.4 and ID.5 and will be sold alongside the combustion and hybrid Tiguan. Volkswagen says the Tiguan and its sister model, the Tayron, delivered more than one million units in the past year, while the ID.4 and ID.5 have delivered more than 950,000 units since 2021.

The naming shift is a commercial calculation, not a technical one. Volkswagen is betting that a familiar badge moves metal faster than an ID number, and it is keeping both powertrains on the same showroom floor.

Truck cost math turns against diesel

The most consequential numbers of the week concern vehicles that carry cargo, not people. A new total cost of ownership analysis from Transport & Environment finds that in six of nine major EU markets, electric trucks are already the best financial choice today, according to a CleanTechnica summary published on 28 September. Those six markets account for 46% of all new heavy trucks sold in the EU.

The savings are large enough to change fleet purchasing. T&E puts five-year savings at €100,000 in the Netherlands, €85,000 in Germany and €69,000 in Denmark, with electric trucks paying off after two years. Running a Chinese truck, which carries a considerably lower price tag, pushes five-year savings to €128,000 in the Netherlands. T&E attributes the trend to increased scale, lower truck prices driven by EU truck CO2 targets, and national incentives such as vehicle subsidies and lower road tolls.

The group models that with existing policy measures plus a limited set of new ones, including implementation of the Eurovignette Directive and RED III, electric trucks will be cheaper to operate in all nine member states by 2030, even if today's purchase subsidies are phased out or reduced. It calls the -43% 2030 CO2 target for trucks essential to economies of scale, and says Italy, France, Spain and Poland need to implement the Eurovignette Directive exempting zero-emission trucks from road infrastructure charges, 100% until 2031 and 50 to 75% afterwards.

The bus order pipeline

Bus fleet news in the dossier is thinner and mostly older than the 72-hour window. SWITCH Mobility secured an order for 840 electric buses from Antony Road Transport Solutions under India's PM E-Drive scheme, a deal covered by Autocar Professional, Autopunditz, Coach Builders India and Entrepreneur India on 27 and 28 September. The reports agree on the headline number. They do not agree on every framing, and none of the versions in this dossier contains a delivery schedule or a contract value.

Separately, Angola plans 1,000 electric buses and 2,000 charging points to fast-track its e-mobility network, according to a report dated 30 September. None of these deployments is as advanced as the Philippines' statutory problem.

That problem is the backdrop for everything above. When the 14th Philippine Electric Vehicle Summit opens in October, it will function as an operational audit of the Department of Energy's Comprehensive Roadmap for the Electric Vehicle Industry, or CREVI, under the Electric Vehicle Industry Development Act, Republic Act 11697. The roadmap requires 311,700 registered electric vehicles and 7,300 dedicated charging stations by 2028, on the way to 50% fleet electrification by 2040. With the 2028 deadline two years away, the summit floor, led by the Electric Vehicle Association of the Philippines, will show how far commercial builders have gotten. Government agencies and commercial cargo operators must make electric vehicles at least five percent of their operational fleets. A vehicle target without a charging grid is meaningless, and the count as of mid-2026 is the fragile part. The dossier does not give that count, which is itself the point.