Telling someone who's interested in buying one of your products that you have a new deal that can save them $75,000 sure seems like a good way to encourage purchases. And that's the effect of a new $200-million credit facility to supportProterra opened the new credit facility in partnership with Mitsui & Co., Ltd., a Japanese investment and trading company.
In the end, Proterra says, the battery leasingroterrs set up makes electric buses cost roughly the same as a diesel bus, but without any dirty in-city emissions. Proterra will also own and service the batteries, and there is a performance warranty that guarantees the buses will retain their energy capacity throughout the 12-year life of the bus. A bonus to Proterra is that when the lease is up, it can use its E2 battery packs in a secondary application, like stationary grid storage.
The idea to lease the batteries is not new, and Proterra already has over a dozen customers involved in its battery leasing program that was started after the 2015 Fixing America's Surface Transportation Act specifically authorized the ability to lease batteries separate from a vehicle. The dozen customers are leasing the packs in around 80 buses. Compare that to the 90-plus customers who have purchased one of the 700+ Proterra buses the company has sold.
: You've been selling the buses for many years already, so why set up this massive battery leasing program now?: We've been offering battery leasing for several years now but not on a scale that benefits all customers. The partnership with Mitsui allows us to use a scalable private sector resource to help offer this service to all customers. You don't often find a financing model that also solves a technical problem.