3 ms·

I'm surprised as Shenzhen has 16,000+ electric buses (BYD?)

• bobthepanda 7y ago
  IIRC China heavily incentivized bus conversions to electric. Neighboring Hong Kong tested and rejected BYD buses because the range was very poor and got eaten up by the hills, and they weren’t getting money from China to do it. That’s part of the reason why Albuquerque had such a poor experience; the route has 1000 ft of elevation gain.
  • erikpukinskis 7y ago
    > got eaten up by the hills Maybe the busses sucked, but this doesn’t make sense as a general point against electric: hills are where EVs shine most. Through regen you can get back most of the energy you spent getting up the hill. You probably need a big capacitor though, or a very big battery with good cooling. So I can imagine cheap-o electric buses would have issues. I would love to see the math on what kind of capacitor/battery you would need to capture 1000 ft of elevation loss by a city bus.
    • bobthepanda 7y ago
      The issue is not torque or power, the issue is the range, particularly going uphill consistently. Regen is not 100% efficient, the route seems to be 1000 ft of gain or loss in one direction, and the Albuquerque buses were sold on the explicit promise that they could last pretty much a full day without charging, which turned out to be false. If you can't run the bus back and forth a full day without charging, this requires more buses to run the same service as a diesel fleet, which makes it a very expensive CapEx item because sourcing decently located space to store and maintain buses is not cheap, nor is maintaining all those extra buses.