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!
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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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
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'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.
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.
"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)
What is your name?
What is your quest?
What is the range and velocity of a laden electric bus?
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.
Right because most mid sized cities in the UK all have functioning bus systems. That is assuming midsize is from say 300,000 plus.