An estimated 1,600 electric school buses are gradually being idled in the United States, after the investment group that bought out the assets of bankrupt Lion Electric told school districts it won’t honour service warranties on the vehicles.

The notice came just as school districts prepare to start their new year, some of them with buses that “cost roughly $345,000 each [and] are now so buggy they are sitting idle,” Politico reports.

“They ran properly for approximately two weeks, then we started getting error messages,” Andrew Dolloff, the superintendent of schools in Yarmouth, Maine, said of the two Lion e-buses his district bought with a federal government grant. The U.S. currently has an estimated 480,000 to 547,000 school buses in operation.

“It’s certainly important,” said Sue Gander, who runs the electric school bus initiative at the Washington, DC-based World Resources Institute. “You want a warranty on your blender, for god’s sake.”

Politico says Lion had orders for 3,400 e-buses across the U.S. Published reports put the number delivered between 800 and 1,600. [Thanks to a sharp-eyed reader for catching the more detailed numbers–Ed.]

Montreal real estate giant Groupe MACH, a lead investor in the new ownership group, declined to comment on the Politico post or explain the decision to rescind the warranties. A query to the Lion website produced an auto-reply indicating the company is “unfortunately unable to respond at this time”.

One of the biggest e-bus grants from the Biden-era Environmental Protection Agency sent $9.9 million to Herscher Community Unit School District #2 in Illinois, enabling the district to buy 25 Lion buses—half of its fleet—and a $450,000 bus barn equipped with charging stations. Now, the district is “really struggling” with one or two of the buses, Superintendent Richard Decman told Politico, and of course “your vocal minority has politicized all this, and thinks [the buses are] the dumbest thing that’s ever been brought on planet Earth.”

But apart from the warranty issue, the buses operate well in winter weather, save the district $7,500 per vehicle per year on diesel fuel—and they also protect child health, reduce air and noise pollution, and serve local electrical grids with their “batteries on wheels”.

Over time, Decman said Herscher wants to keep on building its electric fleet. “The kids love ‘em,” he told Politico. “It’s a much more pleasant ride. It’s quiet, they can hear each other talk.”

More widely, many of the Lion buses are still “working fine. So are vehicles from other bus makers that are financially sound, such as Georgia-based Blue Bird Corporation, which recently reported record profits,” the U.S.-based publication writes. “But school districts with Lion buses now have no recourse for repairs, just as they start ferrying children for the new school year.” Some of them are turning to former Lion employees who are helping them out at no cost, Politico says.

In mid-May, St. Jérôme, Quebec-based Lion looked like it had turned the corner when it announced a “definitive agreement” with a group of Quebec investors for its electric bus manufacturing operation. The new consortium includes serial entrepreneur and former Lion board member Pierre Wilkie and Groupe MACH founder and president Vincent Chiara.

Earlier in May, Lion looked like it was on its way to liquidation when the Quebec government refused any further public funds after investing tens of millions of dollars in the company. But then, the Wilkie/Groupe MACH consortium “agreed to provide new capital, bolstered by the renewal of a provincial government subsidy program that offers incentives to buyers of electric buses,” the Globe and Mail wrote at the time. The new owners said they would take the company private, with a more modest business plan likely focusing on electric school bus manufacturing in St. Jérôme.

“Retail shareholders will probably be wiped out,” the Globe stated, “while other investors could also lose the bulk of their holdings.”