BYD aims to replace Routemaster with 400-mile EV London bus
autocar.co.uk
autocar.co.uk
The EU aims to phase out sales of diesel busses by 2030 but might achieve that several years early, possibly even eliminating diesel from the entire 200K fleet of city busses by that same year.
Basically every city in the country is doing everything they can to buy as much as they can before the ban.
>BYD (for “Build Your Dreams”) is a Chinese manufacturer of automobiles and batteries that is building electric bus fleets and monorails for cities around the world. Berkshire Hathaway bought a large stake in the country in 2008. Wang, a trained chemist and the company’s low-key founder, is worth about U.S.$5.5 billion.
> Charlie Munger, Buffett’s long-time business partner and Berkshire Hathaway’s vice chairman, first suggested investing in BYD, Buffett told Quick. “Charlie called me one day and says, ‘We’ve got to buy BYD. This guy runs it better than Thomas Edison.’ And I said, ‘That isn’t good enough.’ And he called a little later and said, ‘He’s a combination of Edison and Bill Gates.’ And I said, ‘Well, you’re warming up but it still isn’t good enough.'”
> Eventually, Munger’s view prevailed. “Now it’s worked out so well that I’m actually starting to remember that it was my idea,” Buffett said. Of Wang, he added, “He’s got big, big ideas and he’s very good at executing.”
[1] How China’s BYD Became Tesla’s Biggest Threat:
https://www.wsj.com/business/autos/how-chinas-byd-became-tes...
I guess that's still less than half though.
London once had the world's largest system: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trolleybuses_in_London
They also experimented with a few electric buses and that also had range problems but much more importantly they realized if they had hundreds of buses charging overnight it would be a significant strain on the electricity system. Distributing the buses throughout the system and their charging in time by charging them at stops would be a solution to this.
Even a 60kW unit [0] looks to be pretty large and listed as "call us for price".
[0] https://www.heliox-energy.com/us-products/60-kw-dc-charger
Might be a bit cheaper per unit if you buy 19,000 of them (one for each London bus stop).
A lot of cars spend a lot of time stopped at traffic lights and often stopped/crawling in traffic, and it's probably why start-stop mechanisms can really improve fuel efficiency. Engineering Explained with "Americans Have No Idea How Much Fuel Idling Uses":
In Zürich Switzerland the calculation was done between placing charging systems at end terminals or at the central garage (where busses park over night).
It was determined that a central garage charging setup is better because the time the bus spends at the end station may get shortened significantly in order to keep the bus on schedule. So charging time would be very irregular. Also to get the power infrastructure to those locations is very costly compared to a central location.
The new battery bus fleet in Zürich can run for about half a day and then return to the central garage.
Future buses are expected to become more efficient and have larger batteries so the central charging setup makes sense.
The central garage has a fast charging setup for 74 busses underground. It is a very impressive setup.
I would guess they all have companies (and servers) in the EU and the US manned by citizens of these nations and outside of CCP control?
I’m not 100% sure because local governments usually don’t care about these things when purchasing products.
The batteries in these must be enormous.
https://insideevs.com/features/720764/ev-electric-car-fire-r...
https://thedriven.io/2023/05/16/petrol-and-diesel-cars-20-ti...
> Contrary to common disinformation about electric vehicles, data from the Swedish Civil Contingencies Agency (MSB) has shown that EVs are 20 times less likely to catch fire than petrol and diesel cars
It’s strange how FUD related to this has spread considering how many lithium ion batteries each individual has around them right now, and has had for decades.