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Shenzhen Electrifies Entire Public Transit Bus Fleet
- taobility 9y agoThat will be Tesla's next big announcement
- jdavis703 9y agoOnce they have the truck platform, won't it be easy to swap out the trailer for a passenger cabin?
- ClassyJacket 9y agoI doubt it - buses typically have the driver in the same compartment as the passengers, and are much lower to the ground than the trailer.
- oomkiller 9y agoMusk seems to have different plans: http://fortune.com/2017/12/16/elon-musk-public-transport/ http://fortune.com/2017/12/16/elon-musk-public-transport/
- lafar6502 9y agoThese guys better deliver on the promises already made, the list is getting longer every month And meanwhile in China...
- contingencies 9y agoLiving in Shenzhen, it feels like probably 80% of the taxis are electric already. Due to government subsidy the blue electric BYD cabs are more spacious, cheaper (no 2元 fuel surcharge), newer and cleaner than the older red cabs, which are generally clunky dirty squashed VWs. However, the drivers pay more to buy them even with subsidy, and you need a conventional ICE vehicle to get out to the factories in Dongguan, or to cross the border to Hong Kong.
- jsemrau 9y agoShenzen / Hong Kong will be the next Silicon Valley.
- jhobag 9y agoit already is
- dayaz36 9y agoIt already is, but with a lot less bureaucracy. People get things done much quicker there
- Wingman4l7 9y agoYeah, it's easy to get things done fast when you can completely ignore the collective intellectual property rights and trademarks of whole countries, and steal designs and manufacture counterfeit goods wholesale!
- hktrl 9y agoThey make it cheaper and better don't need to blame them. Japan did the same after the WW2 and we're not here to say that Japanese technology sucks. Just watch your phone, it's probably made in China dude.
- IIAOPSW 9y agoHong Kong maybe. The great firewall is really the party shooting itself in the foot.
- adrianN 9y agoThe Chinese market is big enough to build very successful companies that never need to cross the firewall to provide their services.
- 9y ago
- helm33 9y agoDenver bought a bunch of electric busses from BYD for service on the 16th street mall. My understanding is BYD offered a 12 year warranty on the batteries, in order to make the economics work.
- dwyerm 9y agoI noticed RTD had new buses last time I was there. I recall that the original TransTeq EcoMark buses were very progressive for their time. If I remember the story correctly, RTD couldn't find a company that built the right bus for them, so they went off and more or less built their own. Then, over the next decade and a half, I began to see their distinctive low floors and warty roofs in cities and airports all over the nation. I proud of my little city for leading the way, but I'm a little sad to see that TransTeq seems to have disappeared. For a while, it seemed like their ideas were taking over the world. But at least the technology advanced overall. Anyway, my favorite part about the new BYD buses on the Mall is their noise. They have a speaker on the front that 'growls' so that the otherwise-quiet buses have a harder time sneaking up on pedestrians. New solutions to new problems!
- helm33 9y agoFunny you should mention the noise. I took a tour of their charging facility, and the fleet manager noted the busses were originally too quiet. They went to the toy store, bought some toy trucks and rigged that growling solution from the truck noise makers.
- trhway 9y agoStanford electric buses are BYD. It is right under the nose of Tesla :) (on the med school route the buses even pass right by the Tesla headquarters)
- greglindahl 9y agoThey accelerate quite nicely, so it's not so bad to be stuck behind one.
- 9y ago
- olivermarks 9y agoThis is really impressive, I've been very skeptical of heavy payload capability and range for electric vehicles until now. Will be interesting to see how well they perform, how the charging infrastructure works and battery life
- trhway 9y ago> very skeptical of heavy payload capability and range for electric vehicles heavy usually means "not that fast" - so less of the speed-squared drug (at 25miles/hour i remember some guys did double the range, like 400miles+, on a Tesla S) and also the weight of the battery becomes less of a factor on the background of the whole vehicle and cargo weight.
- Gibbon1 9y agoTwo things to note about heavy vehicles. Often the power plant size is less than you would expect. Partly because drag is proportional to frontal area and goes up with the square of the vehicle size. While load is proportional to volume, goes up with the cube. That points to passenger cars being the worst case scenario, not trucks and buses. Second, batteries are a tech that just scales lineally. Double the capacity of a battery pack? Double the weight, volume, and cost. Consider with a bus the metric isn't battery size per bus, it's battery size per passenger. Add for electrified heavy equipment like tractors, etc. The extra weight of the battery is a bonus not a negative. You need weight to get traction not HP.
- woodandsteel 9y agoBuses don't need huge batteries for their size. A typical city bus goes only about 100 miles a day, they do a ton of regenerative breaking, and they can charge at stops and also they tend to sit in the terminal several times a day while the driver takes a break after each circuit. Electric trash collection trucks are even better. That's because they do so much regenerative breaking.
- goldenkey 9y ago
- nwah1 9y agoIs the grid in Shenzhen mostly coal-powered?
- andschwa 9y agoCoal provided electricity to power electric powers ends up _still_ being cleaner than ICEs, which are just about the worst in efficiency or cleanliness as you can get.
- nwah1 9y agoCoal releases lead, radon, and other toxic pollutants into the environment. And you haven't supported the assertion that coal-powered EVs emit less CO2, and it contradicts what I've generally heard elsewhere.
- ecpottinger 9y agoDo the math instead of listening to people who resist change. You are right about the extra stuff that comes with coal power, but you will find with a good modern coal plant, transmission losses, and battery/electric motor loss still puts less CO2 in the air that gasoline cars per mile travelled.
- rayiner 9y agohttps://www.citylab.com/environment/2015/06/where-electric-vehicles-actually-cause-more-pollution-than-gas-cars/397136/ https://www.citylab.com/environment/2015/06/where-electric-v...
- melling 9y agoYou have no idea if coal, gas, or nuclear is used. You just made a guess that they use more coal? According to Wikipedia there are two gas fired plants in Shenzhen: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_major_power_stations_in_Guangdong https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_major_power_stations_i...
- adrianN 9y ago
- pjc50 9y agoThey're turning up in Edinburgh too: https://lothianbuses.co.uk/news/article/Lothian-introduce-the-first-all-electric-buses-to-Edinburgh https://lothianbuses.co.uk/news/article/Lothian-introduce-th... I suspect a lot of bus services around the world with emissions targets are phasing them in right now.
- melling 9y agoThe low-speed maglevs being built in China seem a little more interesting. https://www.yicaiglobal.com/news/construction-low-speed-maglev-train-systems-booming-china https://www.yicaiglobal.com/news/construction-low-speed-magl... Getting people from point A to B faster on mass transit will get them out of cars and cabs.
- seanmcdirmid 9y agoThe Changsha airport-train station maglev link is quite convenient, and ya, definitely saves a cab trip.
- ant6n 9y agoDon't believe anybody trying to sell you a Gadgetbahn
- rektide 9y agoTalk about all the buses you want. What I really really want to hear about is the chargers that make it possible. Give me maximum MW rates and rates for how much each station can crank out in total.
- woodandsteel 9y agoThe article says, "The city has built 8,000 charge points at 510 bus charging stations in order to be able to charge roughly half the fleet at any given time"
- gumby 9y agoWhy is the US not investing in these kinds of infrastructure build outs? I’m not trying to start a flame war, I’m generally curious. I understand the path dependence that, for example, made the US adopt mobile phones much later than everybody else (a modern and high quality wire plant that wasn’t yet amortized). Things like that make things like train networks hard to build too. But bus fleets turn over relatively quickly and incrementally as well. What’s the barrier? The announced deployments all seem like small beer.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- nerdponx 9y agoGraft, inertia, and incompetence.
- strommen 9y agoChina is moving unbelievably fast on electric vehicles. Their government is extremely motivated to stamp out air pollution, and there's nothing really stopping them. It's easy to spend lots of money on infrastructure when there is a rocket-ship economy and no political opposition. The US is behind the rest of the world on vehicle electrification for a couple good reasons (very cheap gasoline and long distances between cities) and a few crappy ones (anti-science Republicans and large rent-seeking auto companies).
- volgo 9y agoThe U.S. legislative system has to cater to everyone's interests. Which is not bad per se, but when it comes to something like this, new environmental laws will always hollow out an entire industry. No matter what new enforcement they try to enact, there'll always be someone powerful lobbying against it.
- enraged_camel 9y ago>>The U.S. legislative system has to cater to everyone's interests. I'd argue that clean air and water are in everyone's interest.
- olingern 9y agoI feel like the US will continue to fall behind the curve until it's one day too late to be looked at as what other countries aspire to. Oh, wait. No one aspires to be us anymore.
- 123oi123 9y agoWell.. when the US insults everyone to their face...
- userbinator 9y agoSince transit buses are on fixed routes, I wonder why they didn't go with trolleybuses instead - no expensive batteries to replace (trolleybuses do have vestigial batteries, but they're much smaller and used for backup), thus better power-to-weight ratio, no need to wait for charging, and otherwise just as if not more environmentally friendly. When I was in Beijing, there were plenty of those. (I know the ultimate source of power may be coal or oil, but it seems to me that even then, going directly from a power plant to the motor would be more efficient than an intermediate charging/discharging step.)
- gumby 9y agoBy trolley bus do you mean what are also called “trackless trolleys” — busses with tires but no fuel storage that get power from an overhead line? I’ve presumed that the infrastructure buildout and lack of flexibility make the TCO generally not worth it. In addition, if you need a mix you may get an economy of scale on one set of gear (maintenance, parts, flexibility etc — like a single-model-of-aircraft airline). But this is speculation on my part
- angled 9y agoTwo other reasons may be aesthetics, and the environment - Beijing gets sandstorms but it doesn't get typhoons. Per CLP (just across the border in Hong Kong): > More than 30% of CLP’s transmission network consists of overhead lines. There are more than 700 400kV transmission towers that form the backbone of its supply system. Overhead lines are exposed and susceptible to the influence of weather and the external environment. If a pylon is destroyed by strong winds or collapses because of a landslip, it will take several months to be back in order. https://www.clp.com.hk/en/about-clp-site/corporate-information-site/scheme-of-control-site/Documents/4.1%20CLP%20Information%20Kit.pdf https://www.clp.com.hk/en/about-clp-site/corporate-informati...
- azurezyq 9y agoThey are quickly phased out, even in Beijing. Most for flexibility I think. Beijing has several thousands of bus lines which pretty covers all major or semi major roads, some of them may use freeways also. Technically you can put overhead wires for all of them, however they may be also expensive and hard to maintain. SF's public transit system is like a toy compared to Beijing's. SF's is more like several double ended trees. BJ's is a real spider web.