May Mobility reveals electric autonomous minibus at CES 2025 | Hacker News Reader

May Mobility reveals electric autonomous minibus at CES 2025

techcrunch.com

23 pointsrustoo13 comments

I'm always sceptic about range. Polish city Gdańsk made tender for electric buses. Requrement was at least 400km real range. Winner promise that and reality was ~250km. There was no chargers installed on terminal loops because it should handle whole day on single charge. That is result of designing system without actual tests and rely only on vendor promises :)

imo in many cases trolleys with some additional bess is sufficient unless you really want long ranges without trolley infra

Tell me they had to pay significant contractual fines that were at least enough to install all the required chargers.

This company isn't the only one running autonomous shuttle buses - what makes theirs different from their competitors?

I suppose it's bigger? It says it has a capacity of 30.

The thing that interests me, is does this thing go faster than 30kph? Because so far all the minibus pilots have basically been for parking lot shuttles.

30kph is more than enough for any urban setting.

maybe on tiny residential side roads.

even in Amsterdam, where most speed limits have reduced to 30kph, there are still main roads and public transport lanes signed for 50kph. https://etsc.eu/amsterdam-follows-paris-brussels-and-madrid-...

and bus operators put a lot of effort into fleet economies of scale, so having to hive their fleets in two with slower and faster buses is unlikely to go well. Especially since there are perfectly valid reasons for an out-of-service bus to use a faster road; 30kph as a maximum is slow enough that the vehicle would be banned from certain classes of road altogether.

> having to hive their fleets in two with slower and faster buses is unlikely to go well

They already do this though. I don't know about Amsterdam, but in Limburg the buses are electric for in-city routes and gas for the longer routes between cities and countries.

N splits may be fine, but N+1 may not be, especially when you consider how rare 30kph only routes are.

I believe the Rotterdam buses (RET) that run till Delft/The Hague, effectively intercity, are all electric.

for cars - mostly yes, for public transport - debatable, depending on area

30kph is a nuisance in any urban setting. Legitimately dangerous, when everyone else is going 50, which is the standard urban speed.

There are so many competitors though? Even VW is building a competing service, with trials starting soon.

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