“Hit the road, Jack, and don’t you come back no more,” sez Albuquerque to BYD, the outfit behind the famous Little Electric Buses That Couldn’t.

Regulars here at the Duke City Chuckle Hut know the story of the Albuquerque Rapid Transit project, a.k.a. ART, which has become something of a nutty cluster of fks, as Charlie Pierce might say.

See, our city fathers once dreamt a grand dream of running electric buses down the middle of Central Avenue in order to something something something, possibly because they’d eaten too much posole right before bedtime, or maybe it was the worm in the mescal.

But the buses supplied by Build Your Dreams — which should rebrand to IYD (In Your Dreams), or perhaps BYOB (Bring Your Own Buses) — apparently make my 1996 F-150 look like a Rolls Royce Silver Cloud.

“You don’t need a mechanic, you need an exorcist,” a frustrated dealership mechanic said of that fiend-ridden Ford, which began rattling itself into bits and pieces about 30 seconds after I drove it off the lot.

I never test-drove an exorcist. Instead, I sprung for a ’98 Toyota. But I expect that not even Fathers Karras and Merrin, with an assist from Kiichiro Toyoda and Toshirô Mifune, could chase the boogeymen out of BYD’s buses, which are said to suffer from brake failures, problems with operable range and battery life, and electrical issues that multiplied upon inspection like flies on hot horseshit, the all-natural substance at the heart of BYD’s marketing strategery. Also, there remains the basic underlying issue of demonic possession.

And so the alleged buses are being returned, assuming they can make it past the city-limits sign without exploding like a penguin on a telly.

To replace them, the city has ordered up 10 new, non-electric buses from a “well-established American company that makes buses all the time,” says Mayor Tim Keller. Why nobody thought of this earlier remains a mystery, especially since it will be a year and a half before the replacement buses can be delivered.

“Obviously, we are very concerned about what we’ve been put through as a city by BYD,” Keller added. “I think down the road, we’re interested in being fairly compensated for [how] we have been misled on these buses.”

A BYD spokescreature, who declined to be identified because the Great Old Ones had not authorized it to speak with the media, said cryptically, “Ph’nglui mglw’nafh Cthulhu R’lyeh wgah’nagl fhtagn.” This is R’lyehian for “In his house at R’lyeh dead Cthulhu has many lawyers.”