Slashdot Mirror
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."
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
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...
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
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!
Sure you do, if you are far enough away that it has gone subsonic.
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.
I for one am surprised Chattanooga has electricity.
They do, but they call it "'lectric".
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.
We have many of those here in Seattle, and those overhead lines are _BEYOND UGLY_.
Or South Korea was flinging Electric Buses at North Korea...
I can see North Korea building Trebuchets to do that after the leaders view the latest in US war tech on Youtube.
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.
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.
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?
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!"
Oh good, let's replace the expensive lithium batteries with even more expensive ultracaps, and then utilize a charging system which is pretty much going to have to have ultracaps in it too in order to deliver them power in a timely fashion so that people can steal them. This is a fantastic idea, and I can't imagine why they didn't use it.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
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).