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South Korea Launches First Electric Bus Fleet
An anonymous reader writes "The Seoul Metropolitan Government just rolled out the world's first commercial all-electric bus service. The buses were designed to be as efficient as possible — each bus can run up to about 52 miles on a single charge and they have a maximum speed of about 62 miles per hour. The vehicles' lithium-ion battery packs can be fully charged in less than 30 minutes and they also feature regenerative braking systems that reuse energy from brakes when running downhill."
"South Korea Launches First" and expected the rest of it to be "Strike Against North Korea".
Its hilly and congested. Many major roads are pretty much gridlocked. Urban speeds are quite slow. Many roads are steep. Motors which don't use energy when stopped are a great idea. Regenerative braking is also worth while.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
Burning gasoline has to do with moving electrons for example.
52 miles could be a days driving for a bus in Seoul.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
Chattanooga has had electric bus service for years - http://www.carta-bus.org/routes/elec_shuttle.asp. Granted, these are "shuttles" and not full on bus service, as they are used for short routes in the downtown area.
I feel like they should get credit where due, however.
I hate sigs...
start a headline with the words "______ Korea Launches" unless it's missiles. My heart skipped a beat there.
Unity? Screw that: XFCE. Slashdot Beta? Screw that: SoylentNews. Australis? Screw that: Pale Moon. UX developers DIAF
Our city is getting some of these in the spring: http://www.ebus.com/
Not nearly the range of the korean ones but still pretty neat.
Pray tell, what in the summary or article gave you such an idea? If you're doing some math based on the 52-mile range and the 62-mph top speed, then you're rather stupidly assuming that the buses will constantly be careening around Seoul at top speed. Perhaps you think Dennis Hopper has returned from the grave?
This is certainly not the first electric bus service, but the first full battery operated bus service.
For bus service, how come you think battery is better to the environment than cable?
Every people is smart, collectively STUPID
They have had trolleybuses (electric) all over the world. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trolleybus
They were not battery powered, but they were busses and they were electric.
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
My first read made me think of these. Electric != battery powered.
Sorry, but electric buses have existed for decades.
The title should read "battery powered buses" instead, but thet's not a great advantage for a bus. A vehicle that always runs through the same route is very easily powered by cables strung along the road.
Over here in Wellington New Zealand we have had all electric buses for a really long time, since 1949 in fact.
they aren't 100% always battery powered, but nobody said they had to be. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trolleybuses_in_Wellington
we have the dedicated trolly bus fleet, that can switch to running on batteries when there is no power, then back to overhead lines when power is restored,
from what I can see this achieves all the positives of the Korean system and none of the negatives (return times, charge times etc) as they are full time
electric but only require the battery power as a backup.
(ok the lines might be a bit unsightly to some, but my point remains)
so this might be the first electric bus system that requires no on the go charging, but is that necessarily a good thing? they still have to plug in sometime.
"This is my Sig. there are many like it but this one is mine."
Koreans slightly beaten to it by The London Electrobus Company founded in 1906 which ran for a couple of years. Well that's what Wikipedia says so it must be true!
I read "South Korea Launches" and that was as far as my mind went before freaking out just a bit.
Nothing like a modern nuclear war to get the blood flowing.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Never hear of replacing batteries ?
No one takes into account that eventually batteries might as well be leased from your electric grid.
And gas stations might become battery swap and recharge stations.
What would be required for this to work is governments making standards for battery sizes.
As the industry itself will never agree on global standards, (it also never happened for razorblades)
So by UN rules or industry leaders battery type A should have the exact following dimensions, and there and here there should be holes as for place holders in any kind of car....
That's bald politics; however these days politicians have lost their balls..and so they don't rule;
No one rules; its a corporate anarchy
How far do you think these buses really go?
How often does a bus go 60mph for a whole hour in downtown Seoul?
You sir are useless.
Assuming they can actually go 52 miles at the top speed of 62 mph, this means the buses can keep moving for about 50 minutes, and then they need to spend 30 minutes recharging. So it effectively takes 80 minutes to go 52 miles, under the assumption of fast driving on the freeway with no stops, which translates to a speed of 40 mph.
In a long distance race, anything which can average more than 40 mph will beat these buses.
Large urban cities would not allow the possibility to drive 52 miles in that amount of time. Cities are very condensed, filled with hills, traffic signals, and a lot of braking. Not to mention its engine doesn't require electricity like a car uses fuel while idle. A conservative estimate probably would give a bus half a day in Seoul. We are not talking about a Greyhound bus service across the countryside.
How much of downtown Seoul is freeway you think?
I for one am surprised Chattanooga has electricity.
You do realize that a bus is a mass transport vehicle that stops every few blocks to pick up passengers and typically doesn't go more than about 40mph on most routes, right? Sure there are buses that travel further and faster, but that's not the norm, most buses are for use in cities at normal speeds.
He's (erroneously) thinking of Seoul as a city laid out like an American west coast city, which covers quite a large area. A bus like this would not survive here as people would need to either wait for it to charge, or transfer busses three times to get anywhere. 62mph on a 70mph road would also put you in the slow lane, getting passed by 18 wheelers.
In Seoul however it DOES make sense, high density and lots of braking + hills could actually improve it's range.
How will the North respond to the inflammatory warmongering of the South Korean puppet buses? An unpredictable defensive blow in a sacred war of justice using nuclear buses?
It IS the norm in America (at least west coast), that's where this misconception comes from. People here think busses, the first thought is long trips or city crossing (40-50 miles).
Stereotypes are the exclusive domain of the thoroughly stupid.
I rode electric buses in th 50's. They ran on the same lines as the old trollys and used the over head electric that the trollys used. Those buses were all electric. Seoul may be the first battery run bus system, but not electric.
We also demand fat cupholders, asshole.
When cycling around Aberdeen, Scotland I regularly over take buses. They never over take me. So that puts their average speed well below 15 miles an hour.
Well, I don't know about the 150MPH, but a place to put my shotgun and a 6-pack is a must.
I still cannot find the droids I am looking for...
Did they have to wait until they had a whole fleet of them built before they could launch the service? How long does it take to build one of these things anyway?
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
If the bus is in sun for most of its service day, then the extra kWh from roof mounted solar panels would help it run the HVAC and get a bit more range.
Uh, Linux geek since 1999.
A typical mainline Seoul Metro bus (Blue line, travels across Seoul, usually from one end to the other) travels 27 km (16.8 mi) one-way in 90 minutes.
Which translates into an average of 18 km/h or 11.2 mph. Also, 52 mi range means the above example bus can travel 3 one-way trip fully charged.
No energy spent while stuck still in city traffic, 30 minutes charging every round-trip (total 3.5 hour: 3 hours travel, 0.5 hour charging) seems perfect, even without regenerative braking.
Admittedly Toronto's electric buses weren't battery operated - they were powered by overhead wires - but they were in service from 1947 to 1993. That start date beats South Korea by more than 6 decades.
'The Economy' is a giant Ponzi scheme whose most pitiable suckers are the youngest among us and the yet-unborn.
I for one am surprised Chattanooga has electricity.
They do, but they call it "'lectric".
This is far from the first electric bus setup.
Around 100 years ago something similar was tried in London. The service collapsed in 1909.
With a bus fleet BTW you can do as they did 100 years ago and just swap out battery packs alleviating the need for long recharging times.
Seoul has an excellent underground transit system. The buses are most likely a feeder service for the trains.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
>regenerative braking systems
Now that's innovative! So how hard does the one need to press to generate 1kW of power?
Hate to burst your bubble but your only (at least) 20 years too late.
Down here in Wellington, New Zealand, we have had a tram-style electric bus system since before the time I was born (mid 80s). They draw electrical energy from the overhead wires similar to the way early electric tram designs.
This system seems far more logical to me, why bungle about with solar panels and lithium ion batteries.... both technologies are not mature enough to last the distance (I highly doubt the expensive batteries which the Korean buses depend apon to function will work in the year 2020)
Cleveland has CNG buses which probably pollute less than an electric bus would given how much of our power comes from coal. They are used on almost all routes except those that go into the farthest suburbs due to the lack of filling stations.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
As the poster said below, 52 miles is along way for an inner city bus. Also, the article discusses regenerative breaking and it seems as though the 52 min is pure battery without the benefits of the breaking - which can only be estimated.
"The world is a construct of forceful imagination. Those who don't know walk around in the reailties of those who do"
I have this brilliant idea to solve the battery range problem.
Since buses travel on fixed routes, you could run overhead electric wires to power them, removing the need for expensive and heavy batteries, and increasing speed.
I cannot believe nobody has thought of this before, and this is the worlds first electric bus fleet.
Maybe a further improvement would be to provide power above the bus stops so the buses can charge slighly whilst stopping to pick up passengers. Sort of a localised power link, save running cables everywhere?
What kind of buses do you take? Is there a freeway circling around downtown, where a single bus cruises at a constant 62 miles per hour? And passengers are catapulted from the city into the bus and vice versa?
In a city like Seoul I think that would be enough. Even if a bus simply runs "once" for a total distance of it's maximum available charge it's still a win in terms of long management of emissions.
It could be argued that they're also starting to address the issue of oil/gas dependency. I spent a few months there and only rode the buses when with Koreans. They seemed efficient and with some of them came equipped with engines that were programmed to stop at a red lights. With the population they have even a one way electric bus route makes sense when thinking long term.
This being slashdot: I haven't read the article so maybe battery life and or cost doesn't make it a viable long term alternative (but that would surprise me.)
Hah, riiight.
As fun as it is to say that, not only does Chattanooga have electricity, Chattanooga also has the fastest residential internet service in the country (I think). 1gbit fiber to your home for $350/mo.
I think my principles are reachin' an all time low
Regenerative braking, by virtue of not being a method of implementing perpetual motion, is limited to generating less energy than is required to get the bus back up to the speed it was going before braking. So it won't extend the range at all, just avoid reducing the range too much in stop-start traffic.
and then started breathing when they saw the words First Electric Bus Fleet
Green Busses Good
Missiles BAD
Any person using FTFY or editing my postings agrees to a US$50.00 charge
Do you honestly think that these are issues they didn't consider? Are you really that stupid?
Now you really are pulling my leg. Internets in TN? Next you will tell me they finally got some dentists too.
Wellington's trolleybuses have been there since 1949, and they were by no means the first. Pyongyang has also had electric buses since 1964. You'd think they'd check these things before making a song and dance about it and handing a propaganda opportunity to their neighbours on a platter.
There've been electric buses in Florence for years...not of the same size as the pictured buses, but definitely a fleet in being.
The scale of the rollout, on the other hand, is certainly worth noting.
While Seoul does have an excellent underground system, there are many occasions when it makes sense to simply take the bus from point A to point B.
Regenerative braking, by virtue of not being a method of implementing perpetual motion, is limited to generating less energy than is required to get the bus back up to the speed it was going before braking. So it won't extend the range at all, just avoid reducing the range too much in stop-start traffic.
So says you and your elitist "scientists".
"Don't be a martyr -- BE THE ONE WHO GOT AWAY!"
Two long, springy polls on the top of each bus connect to a network of bare power lines stretched across the streets.
The government rolls out a commercial bus... that doesn't make sense, unless the South Korean government is actually a private company.
They have a maximum speed of...
Which, as anyone who has been to Korea will tell you, is done precisely 2.3 seconds after an old lady gets on the bus, and hasn't taken her seat yet.
How does breaking benefit the bus? Generally speaking, broken things are not beneficial, but then again, most people know how to spell "brakes".
Instead, these should be loaded with ultracaps that can go about 10 miles (or at least 2x the longest distance between 2 stops) or so AND handle the HVAC. Then at each stop, there is a charging station that quickly fills the bus. With an ultra-cap, you have the ability to charge as quickly as you want (as in seconds, not minutes).
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Yes, internet so they can watch their mothers and sisters, whom after the requisite visit to the dentist for sparkling white dentures, star in porn.
Probably a lot of you know this, but for the benefit of those who don't, S. Korea is currently pursuing an aggressive build-out of new nuclear reactors. According to the U.S. Energy Information Administration S. Korea already gets 34% of its power from nuclear, and plans to be generating 50% from nuclear by 2022 (and will likely keep pushing that percentage up to the 60-80% range longer term).
If the electricity to charge the batteries in the buses comes from nuclear, it should be very low-carbon emissions, low air pollution energy. The South Koreans are also building nuclear at something like 1/2 the cost of equivalent nuclear plants constructed in the U.S., so it should be pretty cheap energy too.
S. Korea is even starting to get into the business of exporting nuclear power plants to other countries - they recently inked a deal with the United Arab Emirates to build four 1.4 GW plants in UAE for a total of $20Bn(USD).
We had an all electric bus service when I was very small in London - Wimbledon, to be precise. Trolley buses - I remember the overhead wires. See http://www.trolleybus.net/subhtml/picture289.htm
Not sure when they stopped, maybe 1962.
And now they are back ... but in Korea? The world is strange.
"Cats like plain crisps"
if so, I want to visit!
it is more about making a real world test of the current capabilities of what south korean companies can do so they can offer the buses to other customers. Doing this they amortize the R&D and will be able to sell at a better price than competitors. Overhead wire is dirt cheap and low maintenance; hell, even in my city here in Mexico we had several mayor routes of trolley buses, two of them were replaced by 2 lines of light rail in the 80's and early 90's, two lines are still in service an the 3-6 other lines were destroyed -like many of the good things in this hell hole country- by corrupt politicians.
Yes, I'm pissed because 30 years ago Mexico was more rich and was has advanced like South Korea. Now, there is no contest. We have the richest man in the world, they have a first world country. My hat of to the korean people.
Mexico: 100% conservative's America now!
they have an awesome aquarium too
My concern with this is that the solution limits you to certain routes. You could not have this operate on a rural bus route. Asking passengers to wait 30 minutes while the bus is recharged would be a bit ridiculous.
I don't understand why they didn't have an interchangeable battery pack. This would have allowed the bus to quickly swap out the exhausted pack and replace it with a new one and you could put the swapping stations at strategic points around the city/rural area.
I think it's one to watch, but until they solve the 'rural' issue this will only work in cities.
Very, very yes. Did the exact same thing.
I blocked off the tail end of the headline and showed my wife, who also nearly flipped her shit.
"We are Samurai, the Keyboard...Cowboys"
You're thinking of the wrong side of Korea.
50-60 years ago there were electric milk delivery vans, there have been electric trains and buses for over a century, just because it's battery powered doesn't make it exciting.
There was an unknown error in the submission.
Newcastle and Gateshead in the north-east of England had a hybrid service for 5 years, but they have recently been replaced with diesel buses because the hybrid buses don't like the hills!:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QuayLink
Reinventing the wheel using Lithium Ion batteries.
I am having some difficulty being convinced that this is much better than taking the good old good trolleybus of the kind which Moscow has been running for nearly 100 years now and adding a 2 mile mini-battery to it.
It would have made much more sense to add some modern "lock/unlock to the cables" tech to a trolleybus system and use the batteries only for the intervals where there is no overhead wires so you can have interrupted coverage. This way you also do not need any of battery swapping and so on. You also pull wires only where it is cost effective and so on.
Baker's Law: Misery no longer loves company. Nowadays it insists on it
http://www.sigsegv.cx/
A friend of mine just sold a load of electric motor bikes to the Hong Kong police force for use in patroling the city. I wonder if it's the difference in geography and demographics between the Far East and where I live (the UK) that drives this move towards electric vehicles, or if it is something to do with having more of a willingness to change the way that essesntial things like mass transportation are done.
god damned RTA always raising rates and cutting routes
Dayton is one of the last places in North America with working electric trolleys. Of course, much of the system runs diesel and propane powered buses, but there are some well-established routes that are 100% powered by overhead electric wire.
And, 52 miles is not that large of a distance for a single bus line. In Dayton alone, one route (Route 19 comes to mind) is probably 28-32 Miles in one direction alone. Take that same bus, and have it run the same route round trip 8-10 times a day, and the 52 mile limit seems rather low, especially if electric batteries are the primary power source.
No, I no longer live in Dayton, but I used to. I left. Got fed up with the bad attitude that town has hovering like a cloud of gloom and doom overhead...
NewcastleGateshead has had electric buses (made in NZ) on its Quaylink service for several years.
Many cities, including mine, have had electric buses for decades:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/7605380@N08/838292900/sizes/z/in/photostream/
In fact, I'm going to ride on one in about an hour...
And restrictive.
Tram lines are even more expensive. Think of a really big number. Nope. Double it. Nope. It's still more expensive than that.
1. Buses are stop/start. The top speed is irrelevant because they have to stop every 500 meters. The average speed is about 10mph no matter what the theoretical top speed is.
2. As above. Overhead lines and tram lines are really expensive. Much more expensive than a battery, or ten.
3. Your average city bus run will be lucky if it tops 10 miles.
Deleted
I dug this up on PopSci - http://www.popsci.com/cars/article/2010-03/koreas-online-electric-vehicle-gathers-power-road-wirelessly
Implementing this via the bus system, to prove the tech, then rolling into other building projects.
Step 1. Induction Road beds
Step 2. City bus systems runs on electro buses
Step 3. modify Hybrid cars to run on induction Step 4. Interstate highways are rebuilt to with the technology - reducing oil reliance, and pollution. Smug may become a problem tho.
It is better to be the hammer than the anvil.
In another slashdot discussion about a year ago, someone linked to a company called Doty Energy. They claim to have a process which can efficiently take electricity, and generate gasoline and diesel from water and waste CO2 (I think the idea is sort-of like reverse-combustion - when hydrocarbon fuels burn cleanly, the products of combustion are energy, water, CO and CO2, so theoretically, it should be possible to 'reverse' the reaction with input energy, water, and CO2 and produce synthetic gas/diesel).
I don't know if the company is legitimate or not, but if they are, then it seems to me they have the best answer for carbon-neutral transportation. The Internal Combustion Engine is just a very effective device for the purposes we put it to, and gas/diesel are incredibly convenient energy storage mechanisms for transportation. Doty *claims* they can produce fuel at a price competitive to oil at $45/bbl, which isn't terribly expensive - oil is currently hovering around $90/bbl. Perhaps Korea needs to get in touch with them, or vice-versa.
With a metro population greater that 22 million, I'd say that the residents of Seoul should be very happy to see pollution reducing tech on the streets; however, pedestrians should take extra caution. As bus drivers in Seoul can get really aggressive with the gas/break(reminded me of playing Crazy Taxi), the additional acceleration, and lower noise pollution of an electric drive train imposes an new sub set of risks the general population is not accustom to.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oak_Ridge,_Tennessee
With the second reactor ever built (first for continuous operation) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X-10_Graphite_Reactor
-Tm
Support TBI Research: http://www.raisinhope.org
It's Transportation as a Service!
More seriously, but along those same lines -- this is another illustration of how it's relatively easy for specialized, larger-scale systems to achieve goals (in this case, battery-electric transportation) that are hugely complicated in the own-your-own market. For example, 30-minute charging is really fast compared to the personal electric vehicles available today. I don't know the details, but I'm pretty sure achieving this involves high-voltage power sources through specialized connectors. That's relatively easy and cost-effective to provide at a few bus depots, but a serious obstacle when you want everyone's parking space to have its own 600V charging station.
Street Cars.
The car and rubber companies killed the street car off early in the last century, (bribes, kick-backs, under the table deals, etc) to be replaced by busses...
Now people act like electric mass transit is something new..
Stop making me feel old and git off my lawn!!!!
perhaps for 1 driver, but for the bus, I would expect a bus in Seoul covers more distance than that in 1 day.
You are so dead on, Bus drivers & Taxi cabs in Korea remind me a playing Crazy Taxi, except worse. http://files.playstatic.com/ps3/crazy-taxi-fare-wars/crazytaxifarewars-pspscreenshots70832007-01-04.16-56-57-312.jpg
They're actually Trolleys, but it's basically the same idea. Run by overhead power.
I'd love to change the world but I can't find the source code.
Baltimore MD had electric buses in the 1950's. Everything old is new again!