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Electric Bus Sets Record With 1,101-Mile Trip On a Single Charge (engadget.com)
A startup called Proterra has set the world record for the furthest distance any electric vehicle has managed before recharging. The Catalyst E2 Max electric bus drove 1,101.2 miles on a single charge, beating the previous record-holder, a one-seat experimental car nicknamed "Boozer." Engadget reports: Not surprisingly, a bus can hold a much larger battery than just about any regular car. The Catalyst E2 Max carries 660kWh, or nearly nine times the capacity of a 75kWh Tesla Model S. Also, Proterra was driving in optimal conditions, with no passengers, no stops and a gentle test track. It'd be another story with a fully-laden bus wending its way through a city. Even so, that kind of range is very promising. In many cases, it could likely handle a long bus route for several hours -- it might only need to recharge at the end of a driver's shift. While it could take an hour or more to top up even with Proterra's fast charging system, bus drivers are no strangers to changing vehicles. The first E2 series buses are due to reach Los Angeles streets later in 2017, so it might not be long before you can witness this longevity first-hand. The company released a video of the record-setting feat on YouTube.
Yes it's not as interesting as having a benchmark of how it will perform in a real-world situation, but it is at least useful in comparing it against other vehicles assuming that they were also tested in a similar way as you can get an idea of relative performance gains.
They probably have done some more realistic simulations where they have weighted dummies loaded on the bus and make periodic starts and stops to simulating running an actual route. This test is done purely for marketing purposes though, as 1,101 miles sounds a lot more impressive and is going to get more people talking about it than if they did a more realistic simulation.
With good regenerative braking, adding passengers would not shorten the range too much.
since their ownership is less diverse.
Having battery-packs fully charged at at bus depot and then a system where they can be swapped out quickly for recharged one's.
Until personal cars will have such a system - forget it!
the bus name is Maxist.
Also, Proterra was driving in optimal conditions, with no passengers, no stops and a gentle test track
Sherman Williams has decided to raise the ante. It is going to release a video of the 200 gallons of paint drying.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
you realize it's in binary
Tesla can quick swap.
Workshop pit with very specialized equipment, not doable across different car brands and on the road. ... people would be able to design and agree...
Buses could load from the side with a modified forklift and one type of battery pack if
Electric buses are not particularly better than diesels on non-stop trips but have a great advantage in stop-and-go driving, so the summary is kind of odd how it plays those advantages up and down the other way around. I guess the point is that electrics are catching up on range now also.
With conventional busses, every stop to pick up or drop off passengers means more brake wear. Brakes are ablative and a big maintenance expense. Also, the bus is always idling and consuming fuel whether it is moving or not in stop-and-go traffic. In comparison, Electric buses use regenerative breaking and do not idle, advantages over diesels which increase with more frequent stops to pickup/drop off passengers and at intersections in the city. Neither of those special advantages come into play in one long, straight, uninterrupted drive; it's the comparison which shows the diesel bus at its relative best.
So busses are a special case which make electrics especially advantageous. In fact, projections are that for shuttle busses at airports, which drive short cyclical routes, even super capacitors would be practical; Because the route is a short cycle, even with a low charge capacity, the bus passes the charger before the capacitor depletes. Charging is almost instant and can occur when the vehicle is otherwise stopped at the terminal to drop off/pickup passengers, adding no additional delay. Also, the number of charger cycles of a super capacitor is much higher than a lithium battery.
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Sorry lads I got the example using a car the other way around.
Well the model S only transports 5 people max; this bus can easily transport 40 to 70 passengers.
I wonder what the real world is, because even half that should be enough for a city bus (500 miles = 20 hours at 25 mph). For a long haul bus, 12 @ 50 maye? = 600 miles (no idea the average greyhound speed, but 12 hours is a driver max shift I think).
for a long haul bus, a 1 hour stop (alleged charge time) every chunk of time less than 12 hours is reasonable too.
I have no idea how this transforms into real world, but it's very promising I think, people don't weigh that much compared to a bus.
Wow, sent an e-mail as suggested when clicking on "use classic" banner, and got a fast response that addressed my msg
If you stand in front of one while it's moving slowly through traffic, your death will relieve you of your distress, while simultaneously being slow enough to be entertaining. win/win
But is it any difference to the tricks the fossil car makers use to get their unrealistic non-real world MPG figures? Taping up gaps, removing seats, using thinner tyres etc
"The hands that help are better far than lips that pray." - Robert Ingersoll (1833-1899)
it may be close to the same as they will be using a lot of regenerative braking
"The hands that help are better far than lips that pray." - Robert Ingersoll (1833-1899)
It's still good enough to make it viable. A bus will do a fraction of that in a day. A sample bus route is 20km long, takes 100 minutes, and has a 20 minute rest at the end. So that's 2 hours. In an 18 hour day, that's 360km. Even with passengers and stop-start it might do that on a single charge. If not, we can top up in those 20 minute breaks.
"No passengers, no stops, on a gentle test track"
Notice how slowly the bus was moving in the video? Presumably to save on air resistance.
I wonder what the range will be at normal city speeds.
The test was done the same way that GM, Ford, Chrysler, Hyundai, Toyota, Honda and all the other auto makers arrive at their best case scenario sticker advertised MPG ratings. The real problem lies in getting all the fat car addicted traffic jams of commuters to use public transportation thus freeing up room in the cities so that we don't have to pave every piece of land for roads and parking to accommodate the ever increasing numbers of personal autos in cities.
China banning the sale of ICE vehicles is a sign of what is to come. But most Americans in a phony claim of personal freedom choose to ignore the fact that very real freedoms have been usurped by an addiction to the personal automobile. As I go out to the sieben/elf to get more smokes and potato chips while I burn off more gas instead of just walking 5 blocks! YES we (self included) are a hypocritical bunch of morons. But we are slowly but surely paying the price for our collective stupidity. That price is the real cost of automobiles run amok and a people who are too stupefied and blinded by the head lights to see the real freedoms that alternatives could bring.
This message was not sent from an iPhone because Peter Sellers really was a deviated prevert without a dime for the call
Honestly, this infatuation with buses has me a bit baffled.
Perhaps it's from people who live in cities with functioning bus systems. I do. The city in question is called "london". I don't know if you call 6.5 million journeys per day infatuation, but I call that "working".
Sure, they do a great job of moving lots of people from point A to point B, but everyone seems to forget to take the actual consumer participation factor out of account.
Well, the nominal population of London is 8.7 million, so the bus system averages a little under one journey per person per day. Which is pretty good.
anecdote about your city to match my anecdote
Perhaps your city sucks at public transport. Maybe you don't have a well integrated transport system. Maybe you have too few busses, or not enough priority given to them. Perhaps they're too expensive, too infrequent or too unreliable. However the fact that London has a working system is an existence proof that shows a working system is perfectly possible. London is not unique in this regard either.
The problem is not with busses, the problem is with your city. I for one welcome electric busses because they don't spew wretched diesel fumes all over the place.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
and make periodic starts and stops
Counter-intuitive to our traditional conditioning, this actually has either no effect or actually improves EV performance. Quite the opposite to a traditional ICE car which has the most efficiency driving long continuous stretches on a highway.
I wonder what the real world is, because even half that should be enough for a city bus (500 miles = 20 hours at 25 mph).
That depends on how efficient the regenerative breaking is. The big efficiency killer for busses is the frequency of stops. Going fast doesn't take much energy in a streamlined vehicle, but accelerating does.
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A [] dedicated lane constant 5mph trolley that is pre-timed for lights will kick the shit out of these useless artifacts. Someone please kill off buses. They suck and don't work.
The problems with trollys (and trains in general) is that they are under-utilized. Having dedicated lanes devoted to a certain type of vehicle is a waste of space.
I see the same issue with trains from city-to-city. You have tracks stretching hundreds of miles which, for the most part, have no on one them. Meantime, the highway is packed with cars. Each individual on the car may take up more per-capita space for their vehicle, but the trains aren't packed closely enough to compete in a total transportation-space-per-capita comparison.
Fast Federal Court and I.T.C. updates
The power draw required to charge one bus let alone a fleet would be insane.
Put in a smaller battery and a turbine or fuel cell optimized to deliver the average power the vehicle uses.
Also, how safe are large batteries in accidents? Buses are usually full of people. Which is one reason why they're usually powered with Diesel fuel and not gasoline, LPG or CNG.
There's never a break even for ICEs; at least once you start using an electric car your CO2 footprint is relatively reducing compared to similar ICE, even if you're using dirty power.
Coal power stations are being phased out (gas turbine does still have a presence for the next few years as a fast response base load assist), eventually there'll be a greater utilisation of direct solar panel / wind turbine to car charging cycle and I won't be surprised if cars perform a secondary function as a large power storage system ( even though there'll be a lot of movements, overall there'll be a lot of parked cars at any given moment ) to deal with the greater level of unpredictability associated with our current green-energy sources.
It's like the old complaint that solar panels used more power to produce than they ever yield, that became invalid about 20 years ago (we're now at about 4~5x return). Things get better, old inefficiencies are removed. In another 20 years we'll look back and wonder why everyone was freaking out so much.
It's a Slashdot post, not a Wkipedia article. Do your own research.
Any wheeled vehicle, perhaps.
I seem to remember some airplane that flew right around the world powered solely by solar panels.
And don't get me started on trolley buses, trams and electric trains. I assume that what the summary really meant was self-contained, wheeled vehicles.
The frequent stops of buses at predetermined locations may be an opportunity to recharge the battery at these locations (half a minute of charging every five minutes amounts to 6 minutes of charging per hour), perhaps eliminating the need to make a long stop for a full charge.
If I recall correctly, it had some structural issues where it broke in two.
"The extra CO2 released during production of an electric car versus its ICE alternative is the same amount of CO2 the average ICE user releases over 7 years" why did you forget to mention the amount of CO2 released during the production of an ICE and not add it to the comparison (plus all the CO2 released in fossil fuel extraction, transportation and refinement)?
"The hands that help are better far than lips that pray." - Robert Ingersoll (1833-1899)
Having battery-packs fully charged at at bus depot and then a system where they can be swapped out quickly for recharged one's.
Battery swapping a fixed points on the route MAKES sense.
Specially since you also need to swap the bus driver.
Several jurisdictions, at least here around in Europe, severely limit how much a professional driver can drive in 1 single go and how much time he can total per day.
Means that the driver has mandatory breaks that he needs to take on a few set points on the road (e.g.: on the terminus, or at a big station in the middle like the central railway station) and that he also needs to be replaced behind the wheel.
All these are breaks that already happen today on a bus route and are perfect opportunity to swap the battery and/or top them up.
(it's already how it is implemented in places that have running electric buses for decades, like Zermatt in Switzerland).
And that's neglecting other current technology, like continuously charging the bus during service, like trolley bus.
One could imagine a "hybrid" type of electric bus, that connects to the trolley overhead wires to charge while on the "in-city" part of its route, and disconnects completely when reaching the country-side
That's already partially implemented, although at a much smaller scale, with current-day trolley able to disconnect and switch to an alternative power supply (small battery or small diesel generator) in order to circumvent construction works on their usual route.
Until personal cars will have such a system - forget it!
Although the technology DOES exist, it isn't much popular.
- in city, you charge the car over night and don't give a damn about swapping batteries.
- on a road trip, the driver will need rest (half an hour every 2 hours - strongly recommanded everywhere, and required in some professional contexts) much more frequently than the range ( > 300 km) achieved by current top-of-the-crop cars from several manufacturer
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
Baba Ram Das & the Merry Pranksters . Pioneering electric road trip experiences.
Thing is, no one actually used the Tesla battery swap system. There is just no demand. Charging is more than good enough already.
I spend less time "fuelling" my car now that I'm driving an EV than I did pumping petrol into my old ICE vehicle. At home plugging in takes about 10 seconds, in public it's about 30 seconds because I have to get the cable out of the boot and maybe another 30 seconds if I need to activate the charger with my phone.
I think the last time I actually had to wait for charging was a couple of years ago when I stopped for 15 minutes to get a top-up in my old 24kWh car. The new 30kWh one wouldn't have needed that.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
Putting copper wires around a battery is now a tech job?
Drive it 1101 miles back again, two points...
Efficiency is not the queestion. It is likely far over 90%.
Regenerative breaking obviously only 'generates' energy when you break. It only improves range over a car/bus that brakes similar often but uses ordinary breaks only.
Bottom line a bus that never stops, goes farer than a bus with regenerative breaking that stops often. A no brainer. With regenerative breaking we can mitigate that 'loss' and probably reach 90% (or more) of the distance a bus would reach if it never braked.
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
(gas turbine does still have a presence for the next few years as a fast response base load assist)
Perhaps you want to look up the term base load
And what a fast response power plant is. (Hint: the latter is called balancing power plant or depending on grid topology: reserve power plant (secondary reserve))
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
Fair call, incorrect use of term on my behalf. Thankfully won't change the progress of the industry.
Its also a bus, not a tiny sports car
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What is your name?
What is your quest?
What is the range and velocity of a laden electric bus?
Big cities are much easier to have great bus / train system. For a mid size city which does not have sufficient density to justify the extra buses or trains that would make it more convenient. So unless they add a sizable gas tax, it is never going to be a decent way to get around.
Although the investigation ultimately found that GM broke anti-trust laws, the central conspiratorial charge—the provision of poor transit service in order to increase automobile sales—was not the basis of the investigation. In fact, most transit historians and other scholars generally disregard the conspiracy theory.
Almost every big city today has electric mass transit in the form of subways. Buses became popular because they aren't tied to fixed overhead wires.
Yes, but Jesus loves the internal combustion engine, and it is from Satan that electric vehicles arise. Remember the 11th Commandment; "Thou shalt have no other motive energy force than fossil fuels, so sayeth the Lord."
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Yeah, thing is electric buses are about air quality in our cities. Further in cities most buses actually do around 100 miles a day, so a 1100 mile range is enough for a whole day of driving and more. My guess is most of these buses will be delivered with a lower capacity battery pack.
Right because most mid sized cities in the UK all have functioning bus systems. That is assuming midsize is from say 300,000 plus.
They are also extremely expensive to implement in cities. For example recently Edinburgh put in a tram system, for the money spent you could replace every single bus in the city with an electric one. Way better use of money than a tram system that only goes between the centre of the city and the airport.
My test track is entirely downhill.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
I forgot turning up to 11. smite me down :)
"The hands that help are better far than lips that pray." - Robert Ingersoll (1833-1899)
there is already a truck that does that, but it hydrogen power electric and good for 800-1200 miles https://nikolamotor.com/one
"The hands that help are better far than lips that pray." - Robert Ingersoll (1833-1899)
How would regen help with energy lost to air resistance?
Most of the busses in Vancouver, Canada are electric trolleys (using overhead cables). I'm referring to the buses in the city of Vancouver itself; the suburban buses are diesel.
Making the suburban buses battery-electric and setting up routes that rotate them through the city center to recharge could be very effective.
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That actually was invalidated a few years after they had market qualities, something like 45 years ago. ...
But the myth is still strong
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
You're complaining about a report about the results of one stage of a testing process. As such, it is a baseline benchmark which is a necessary step in a process, not intended to be a test under the realistic conditions to be expected in actual conditions of use. IMO, you are making a big fuss about nothing, and are missing the whole point of benchmark testing. The real world will always produce different results than a single benchmark test.
PlaynBass
How could wasting energy to stop and start the vehicle possibly improve performance over driving continuously?
Regen helps with not losing energy to the endless cycle of stop-and-go traffic in cities. Typical inner-city speeds (or general LA-area in this case) make air resistance a fairly minor factor.
Additional weight of passengers is actually not a huge factor either - because once again you get most of the energy back via regen.
You can get rich if you own a politician, but you have to be rich to buy one in the first place.
I live in LA - the bus is slow but it's not that slow. Obviously regen helps get back the cost of acceleration, but (https://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=11136353&cid=55229301) is specifically talking about air resistance, and the reply spouts off about regen. Seems like a solution in search of a problem in the context of the original comment. Air resistance increases rapidly with speed and other frictional losses generally approximate linear scaling. Summary suggests it should last as long as the driver's shift, which is nothing like 1000 miles.
Hammond wears a hat. James drives very slowly. And I drive the longest range electric bus..... in the world.
Drill baby drill - on Mars
The Wright Flyer didn't carry any passengers either. What's your point?
Drill baby drill - on Mars
so it has 9x the battery power as a tesla s and can only manage ~3x the distance :S
It has about 8x the passenger capacity and said passengers don't have to worry about getting the thing to a charging station.
Drill baby drill - on Mars
How could wasting energy...
And there is your incorrect assumption in the first 4 words. EVs recover most of their energy during stop start (short of emergency breaking). At that point all you're left with is a vehicle driving slower, closer to it's higher torque curve which on a variable speed system is often closer to peak motor efficiency, and at the speeds of the inner city far lower in terms of air resistance.
I mean EVs get max range driving perfectly steady at around 15mph. They don't lose much in stopping and starting, but they lose a lot as soon as they are out of stop-start situations as they are able to open up a bit more in the comfort of higher speed limits.
Cars on the other hand waste 100% of their energy when breaking, use energy running idle, have low torque at low RPMs causing starting from a stop to be very inefficient, and generally achieve peak mileage driving around 55mph.
They average about 13 MPH.
http://cityobservatory.org/urb...
Inner city buses, of course.
"So long and thanks for all the fish."
Jesus loves the ICE because electric powered weed whackers mean dragging a long extension cord behind you. Sheesh!
"So long and thanks for all the fish."
That computation includes time spent stopped in traffic or at stops. It's not the average speed the bus moves while it's travelling. The promotional piece even says the bus will likely be able to last a driver's shift without recharging most of the time. Unless we're asserting a typical urban bus driver drives over 1000 miles in a shift I think the conclusion is that no, it's not at all "close to the same" as this demo.
Pretty cool though.
I don't know. Zap!.