EEVblog #1339 - Looking at an Electric Bus!

Dave visits Transit Systems to take a look at a fully electric bus with a 328kWh battery back running on regular Sydney bus routes. How does it compare to an electric car?

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#Electric #Bus #Sydney

[StreuB]

This was FASCINATING!!!! BIG UP to Transit Systems for allowing Dave what appears to be a completely wide open tour!!! This was AWESOME!!!

[purerhodium]

Looking forward to a teardown of all the power electronics in those buses, Dave!

[OleF]

Time to thank the guys for good explanation and the time they spent for Dave and us. Good job!

[didgitalpunk]

"there's almost half a million electric busses in the world, but you don't hear about them"
Yes dave, that's because of the electric bit. no vroom vroom, just silence!

[liryan]

I’m from China and those brands (BYD, Yutong) definitely dominates the Electric bus market. In my hometown majority of the buses are now fully electric, with some exceptions of extra long services (over 20kms one direction) still using natural gas. I would say it’s much better, a lot quieter streets. You never realise how much noise buses made until they were all gone. The range tend to be an issue in the winter where the batteries itself won’t able to hold much charge around 0 degrees C, but in the winter gas is also in shortage in China as it’s used for heating as well.
Pollution wise, the power composition in China is somewhat similar to Australia- heavy on coal and fast growing renewables. But people do benefit from a cleaner city air, and grid is getting cleaner.
Overall I don’t see the reason why not using electric buses, especially if people driving it feels it’s not a white elephant and genuinely like them.

[pauldickhoff]

Eindhoven (The Netherlands) has a fleet of 43 locally produced, articulated VDL busses running since 2016 without great problems.

[rudgespeed]

Electric buses were very popular in the 1930s to '50s as cities began to switch their trolley/tram systems to buses. This made sense because the overhead wires and other infrastructure were already in place. Even though they have disadvantages (stuck to routes, can't leapfrog), they are quiet and clean. I think that battery buses are cool, but hauling all those batteries around is expensive and heavy. There are electric buses that use overhead wires on parts of the route, but can run on batteries as well for short distances, recharging while under wires. This makes a lot of sense to me.

[jurabondarchook]

In Netherlands we have a lot of electric buses.
They have funky chargers. Contacts are on the roof of bus. Bus just drive in under special horizontal bar with contacts and charging.

[Andrzej.]

Hi.

We have been using ZEV buses for years in Warsaw (Poland), we currently have 92 such vehicles, most of them were produced by Solaris (Polish bus factory).
Another 70 electric buses were ordered and are being produced.
Additionally, almost 800 other buses meet the EURO VI standard.

If you count the buses, trams and trains used in Warsaw public transportation, 43% of them are electric vehicles.
Most of these vehicles were produced in factories in Poland.

[lightningdemolition]

there are even buses that are a hybrid between battery only and pantograph trollies. they use " opportunity charging" which is a high capacity short duration charger which charges the bus for a few minutes using overhead chargers at each stop and during wait times and driver breaks. it allows the bus to go all day long with a much smaller and cheaper battery pack and eliminate the need for continuous trolley lines. if they need to extend the network they might only need to put a charger at rhe furthest stop. this method also works for electruc forklifts.

[IIVQ]

I work with electric buses (I make the schedules for the buses and the drivers in the area north of Amsterdam, the Netherlands).
A few remarks on other commenters and the video:

- Electric vehicles running on oil-fired power plants emit about 50% carbon compared to a diesel truck or car, well-to-wheel. The amount of particulate matter is dependent on what filtering the power plant operator installed.
- There seems to be a lot of dust buildup in that rear compartiment. Interestingly, our BYD buses had a problem where they would have large amounts of black dust everywhere, including the passenger compartiment. Testing found it was improper sealing, it being mostly carbon which is probably road dust from tires (either the buses own or from other vehicles).
- The amount/speed of recharging is an operational problem. For example, the area I work with needs 109 (83 of them electric) buses in peak hours, but only 70 during mid-day. So part of buses come in after morning peak to charge, then others come in etcetera. The evening peak is most problematic as we need less buses for drinving than morning peak but it's "wider" (from 2:30 pm when schools go out till 19:00 when the peak buses return from their endpoints), so some buses are charging in the evening peak. In some areas where the usage pattern is more "flat" you need extra buses to charge and thus faster charging and/or changing batteries would be beneficial, but in areas with high peaks we have no more buses than we would have if we rode diesel buses.
The buses I work with charge 3-4 times a day on average, but the buses we have in another area charge about 10 times a day (we have a lot of 24h lines, buses there running 17h/day on average) and they fast charge with 240kW
- In Arnhem, which is a trolley city, they are experimenting with "trolley 2.0" which is trolley buses with a battery pack which will charge on a central section yet can drive a few kilometres out in suburbs, removing the costs of installing trolley wire in every outlying suburb.
- Heating is often still done with diesel, as electric heating takes a huge hit on the batteries while only being needed for a few months a year. Electric heating takes up relatively minor amounts of diesel. Some buses have heat pumps (aircons that can heat and cool) and (in Dutch weather) the aircon in summer takes more power than heating in winter.
- For us, the total cost of ownership is about similar to diesel buses. The buses are a lot more expensive (think double/tripe), chargers are very expensive as well (a quarter of the price of the bus) but the maintnance costs are a lot lower and the electricity is extremely cheap compared to fuel.
- One major difficulty is getting a power line to the charging locations, often needing two years to have it built, which is problematic as the time from giving a concession to running it is usually about 1.5 years. On our current location we could pull 2900 kW if all buses would be charging at the same time + about 300kW for the facility (heating, compressor, office light etc), but the power usage is measured at 5 (random) moments per day, and if one of those measurements show we go over 2000kW grid pull, we'll be required to pay for a larger grid connection for 2 years (which is multiple thousands of euros extra per month). We were promised a larger connection but the cable has to be routed under a rail line, the rail operator has protested due to their electromagnetic field sensitive signalling equipement and it also has to go trough a canal dike, not your default "just dig a trench and lay a cable".

[DrFod]

I've got a great idea. Instead of lugging a massive battery pack around, why not suspend wires above the street with a contact pole or pantograph to pick up the current? Lighter weight, more efficient, less environmental impact and can run all day without having to recharge.

Surprised no one has thought of this before. Oh wait, they were doing this over a hundred years ago.

[OtherDalfite]

Dave, as a bus engineer, thanks for posting! This was really interesting to me

[kamila]

Thank you Dave, thank you all guys from Transit Systems for showing this and all information. Great documentary!

[stephengloor]

Electric buses seem like a total no brainer now. No range anxiety and no diesel particulates spewing out when stationary in traffic.

[solveit]

I'm from Rzeszow, Poland and we got Electric Buses too :)

[JuanJDumeP]

LifePo4 is the wave man. Got it on my eBike pulling 300 amps @86v and they don't even break a sweat. Also and most importantly it's is safe to pull that level of energy from it and even if it wasn't the cells are super safe no fire no explosion.

[ClassicGOD]

For as long as I can remember there were trolleybuses in my city. There is even a joke about my city going around - something like: "If you don't know what city you are in and you look up and there are the traction wires but you look down and there are no train tracks you know you are in Tychy." but they are switching now to battery powered electric buses with automated chargers on key stops (where the bus waits for the next curse etc). It's kind of sad to see them get replaced but technology must move forward.

[simuler]

We have electric busses here in Bulgaria from the end of last year. The main difference is the charging is done true contacts on the top of the bus, so it can be charged more easy on rout.

[danfishlock]

It's amazing how so much particulate pollution in cities now is actually from tyre rubber! Solving that problem, and decreasing road noise, while still maintaining good traction is a challenging materials science problem.