This is a great video. I love that it's essentially a bunch of chill depot workers and Dave talking, not a bunch of governmet'y types that don't know what they're actually talking about.
That's really forthcoming of them to let you see all their tech and answer all your questions. And it's not common that they dedicate so much time for a visitor. Well, I guess a relatively big/important company which is offering a public service like this is more likely or at least should be doing this but it's amazing that they're happy to do it for RUclips.
Yeah! Imagine how quiet cities would become... people's voices will become noticable again, no more engines drowning the noises made by people and animals. It would improce quality of living by at least a few orders of magnitude.
Seeing these busses go along my old route, living across from the Valhalla in the Glebe (Sydney) in the 80's, remembering the grime and smell, it makes me enthusiastic to think of the place quiet, clean and peaceful thanks to the future of electric vehicles. So much for our obsession with a dystopian future. Thank you for this fascinating, informative video.
We do also have electric busses (Denmark, Copenhagen) and some of them rather large (18 meter long) two part vehicles. The official plans is to replace most busses with electric models within a couple of years. We have been testing electric battery busses since 2014.
Really good Dave - do we all now agree that E is the way of the future, lol. I NEVER even knew that we had E-buses in AU, but very happy to hear of their success in a pretty demanding environment.
Here in Paris we have 150 pure electric buses. Another 800 on order. Also 950 hybrid buses - helps a bit. That’s about 25% of the total, better than nothing, keep going!
@@ironman8257 I don’t think the cost of the line infrastructure required would be acceptable and I’m certain the visual impact of the wiring spaghetti would not be acceptable. We do have tramways that replace major car routes around the city where the infrastructure is less impacting on the visual environment.
What many may don't know and be surprised about, Poland now has Europe's biggest electric bus maker (50% of its units go abroad), and in the country there are currently 3 e-bus producers. The number is steadily increasing, and a year ago there were about 200 registered in several cities with further couple hundreds ordered.
Don't touch the orange cables...! To (commercially) work on high voltage (SAE definition, not grid) EVs, people need quite the qualification, similar to the level of an electrician. Everyone else, even if just working on some other part of the vehicle need to be teached about the risks and how to avoid them.
We've had the RAC Intellibus here in Western Australia since 2016, fully electric autonomous bus, it goes to various parts of the state to give people a try of it.
Seen these busses quite a few times and always wondered what they were like to ride on. Sadly they don't yet go anywhere I want to go, it was great seeing such an in-depth review of them. Kudos to the team running the program and their enthusiasm shows, hope to see and be able to ride in them more often. I don't know about pure EV cars(though I am extremely positive of Plug-in EVs) but inner-city busses and batteries are a perfect marriage. No noise in narrow streets, no local pollution, better at keeping up in heavy traffic, smoother ride, fewer chances of breaking down mid-journey.
This is all very informative and interesting. Please come over to Melbourne and make the same sort of video for our electric buses. I haven't found any videos of this quality regarding our Melbourne ones.
I have to say the mechanic was very good, no uumm or aahh trying to think he knew the info. We got one of these in Melbourne the public love it, great bus.
Electric buses have actually been around since the 1880s and especially since the mid 20th century and there are big fleets of them around the world, especially in Europe. You might know them as trolleybuses. What you're actually talking about here is battery electric buses, which are the same thing except that they operate independently and involve the environmentally detrimental process of manufacturing and disposal of batteries, not to mention extra weight and the issues associated with that. So battery-electric buses are not perfect but better than having diesel buses but not as good as having trolleybuses. Nowadays, trolleybuses have smaller battery packs on board so that they can run either on-wire or off-wire with in-motion charging, which gives them almost as much flexibility as a diesel bus and an infinitely greater range than a battery-electric bus, hence little downtime. Because they are lighter due to not having those loads of batteries on board, they can also haul a full load of passengers, up to 100 in a 12 metre bus, compared to this Gemilang which has a capacity of about 60. I note the huge aisle stairs at the back of that Gemilang bus. In Europe the electric buses have a fully stepless aisle (since obviously there's no longer an engine that has to go under the floor and the batteries are all on the roof), so that's a compromised feature that still needs improvement on these Australian models. There are further models currently being developed by Australian manufacturers so it's still a work in progress.
San Francisco has had electric buses in one form or another since 1935. Current day they have electric trolleys, diesel hybrid buses, completely electric buses, and cable cars. (Also some diesel buses.) The electric trolleys are preferred on the steepest grades where diesel buses can just not make it.
There is an autonomous bus running around part of the Foreshore in Perth for the last year or two. It's currently gone on holiday down to Busselton. It's an RAC WA project
Lithium Iron Phosphate batteries if used carefully should last a heck of a long time. I'd expect more than 8 years of of them with daily charging and not draining below 20%.
Excellent video!!! The knowledge gained from ur video is of a lot of help. Just one more thing the comparison between the cost of running per Kilometer between electric bus and a diesel bus/ gas bus wasn’t very clear but if u can comment and help that would be great. And last thing would solar panels actually help considering Sydney to be a sunny place
Here in Karlsruhe we have a hydrogen shuttle bus that was developed at our university to link our different campuses (campi?). It's actually quite good because that bus is driving around for 18 hours a day, without any pause to charge. The only issue is the lack of any hydrogen infrastructure anywhere in the world, so the uni also had to build it's own filling station. I believe the original plans even included directly electrolysing the rhine river, but that was never implemented unfortunately.
i’ll explain to you what has happened in 1 year: Transit Systems has around 14 electric buses. the extra 10 are yutongs which are ugly and sydney bus enthusiasts do not like them. Transit Systems still has the most electric buses out of any operator in sydney. They still have gas buses which won’t be replaced for another 10 years so the info in this video is not fully correct.
Great update on electric buses in Sydney. I am very interested in Vehicle to Grid (V2G) and virtual batteries for grid stabilisation. It seems to me that a bus fleet of some 800 vehicles at around say 300 kwh each could provide an enormous opportunity to use the fleet for V2G and grid stabilisation. In particular the usage profile of buses with two peaks demands then being parked for most of the day ( when the sun is shining and most of the night ( no solar) could mean they could be a huge virtual battery. I would good to know if State Transit are thing about V2G. Bye the way a great video. Thanks
I agree with your take on in-road dynamic charging. It is going to be massively expensive and not provide enough benefit. However wireless opportunity charging is being used to great effect by the Antelope Valley Transit Authority in California. They can get 250kW charge during their ten minute breaks. This can keep their busses going all day long where they would normally have to swap them out later in the day.
Here in Vienna we have some small Rampini city busses that use the tram catenary (or rather, special sections of wire directly connected to it, as they also need a current return path obviously) for recharging at the termini. www.flickr.com/photos/anurgaliyev/11837831765/
We've had electric buses here in Netherlands for a while now, the reduced vibration and noise (especially compared to the regular models when you sit on top of the engine area) is very noticeable. With noise cancelling headphones there's not much left of the operational sound of those things, Id almost be okay with regular ones if it wasn't for a lot of other passengers (in normal non-pandemic times). The acceleration is a lot smoother as well. I did notice when they were new though that their brakes probably were a bit more agressive than what the drivers were used to and some drivers would accelerate faster than was comfortable for some standing people during a busy ride in the morning and late afternoon peak hours. I think the ones I've seen around here are of the VDL Citea brand? Their charging contacts are at the top of the bus and can extend up to dock with charging infrastructure like this: www.vdlbuscoach.com/_cache/_public/VDL-Citea-SLFA-181-Electric_MKF3126_MR-small_cl8xNDAweDBfZF8xX2pwZ18vX2Fzc2V0L19wcml2YXRlL3NuaXBwZXQvMzAxNw_b4142abd.jpg
Yeah, I got that as well.. 368 kwh, depending on your electric rate (I'll take $0.10/kwh), that's $36.80 per full charge, but they're only using about 60% of the charge, so that's about $23, they're going about 120kms in a shift so $0.18 /km, which isn't bad for a 15 ton bus
The only problem that I see vs the buses that are used in my country is passengers capacity. City buses here have a capacity of approx. 100-120 passengers.
Still funny how people think electric vehicles are zero emissions yet what does it take to produce them since you gotta mine for the materials used for constructing it
Great video, thanks. What does your wife drive? No worries about the focus, your videos are huge on very satisfying tech content. If they replaced a lot of that metal with carbon fiber it would be a lot lighter. The regenerative breaking numbers are really impressive. AS battery tech improves this situation will only get better.
the trial was successful and transit systems now has around 60 electric buses. Transit Systems have recently purchased some new australian buses which are much better then the ones shown in the video. they have the most electric buses in sydney with other company’s having either as little as 5 or none.
@@macelius sorry this was my mistake but transit systems only has 14 electric buses. they have 41 models of this bus but in diesel form so the trial wasn’t successful with these ones but the new australian built buses ( Custom Coaches Element) may be. also note that the diesel models of these buses were purchased after this electric buses was delivered to leichardt depot. edit: they also have another 28 but with a scania K310UB engine which is not electric, but the same model as the one shown in the video and was purchased very recently
i’m back as i have just found out that transport for nsw has banned all electric buses from being built overseas so no more of these yutongs or electric buses, only nsw built buses
Most cars have more batt capacity than they state in the specs. They use the excess capacity to automatically compensates for any battery loss per year until the spare pool runs out. It's more about perception, if the purchaser sees the capacity fall in their 1 year old vehicle it doesnt look good for brand image.
@Ben Wilson It's not so much an excess pool that runs out, but a reserved buffer (typically some 3-5% of the actual capacity), as regularly charging Lithium batteries to 100% does dramatically reduce the durability. Hence you *will* recognize degradation immediately when it occurs.
Solar is awesome, but this* (installing solar at the depot) is exactly one of those cases where the bus is being used constantly during peak insolation period...so not useful to charge the bus...but definitely excellent to offset the consumption of charging 70% of a 400kwh battery every night. As solar vehicles go...a bus is one of the few cases where it almost makes a bit of sense to add several kw of solar to the roof. Info from solarelectricityhandbook.com Say you could fit 20m^2 of panels, in the dead of winter with flat panels and low sun in Sydney you'd get 2.5kwh/sqm/day = ~50kWh. Summer would be 6kWh/sqm/day = 120kWh So much depends on how long the bus would be in shadow, but is' free real estate. ....a least better than a f**king roadway.
You've got to weigh up the downsides of extra maintenance, extra weight, blockage of cooling vents, extra height against the slightly reduced energy drawn from the grid upon recharging. They couldn't make the batteries any smaller just because of the panels, because some days are just overcast... so I find it hard to believe that it'd ever work out to be economically sensible to put panels on the roof of a bus.
@@frollard Agreed in principle that solar roofs would be a great idea in Sydney but I don't think you'd get 2.5kWh from 1m^2. Unless I'm mistaken solar panels are about 1m^2 in size but generate at most 325W per hour.
Procurement policies here (Canada) would have a fit over buying busses made overseas so long as domestic factories produce them - even if fossil fuel powered. Will probably prevent the adoption of battery powered busses here for the foreseeable future due to the costs of upgrading the production infrastructure.
There are already at least 4 battery-electric bus plants in North America: BYD has facilities in Newmarket and California, New Flyer in New York, and Proterra in California. The TTC's currently running a 60 bus trial (the largest battery-electric bus fleet in North America, made up of 25 New Flyers, 25 Proterras and 10 BYDs), with plans to be 100% zero-emission by 2040.
We could have had electric buses with quiet rubber wheels driving down the major road in Sydney for a 100th of the cost of putting rails in on a metre of concrete and excluding other traffic. see Copenhagen thirty years ago.
Full electric is so much better, here in The Netherlands they have trials with hydrogen busses. Because there is no hydrogen infrastructure, they put them on diesel trucks and move them 100 km every night to refill them. Its like solar roads, they just never learn over here.
where'nt they talkin about electric busses for syd years ago? ...it would make sence to put solar roadways on the roofs of them busses...recharge em while they driving..or just sittin in the depo the new tram system is all electric right?... that will get some busses outta the city nice look into the guts!...good job Dave!..thanks!
Hey Dave have you Discovered the THETA network I think you would be able to make more money with THETA since it's token it with around $2 vs LRBY's 5 cents or whatever. I watch NASA's channel but I would breath watch yours. Thanks for reading.
Why shouldn't anybody be able to refill a gas bus LPG or butane anybody can get a supply of that doesn't make sense make a nice motor home. Do you have a lot of LPG petrol stations in Australia
Dave, Please make your main channel intro blurb about the exact diff between uploads more clear....I started watching pre-coffee. Perhaps it was the morning mental fog, but I got the impression this would be a long "extra cut," not an "extended cut." While I wouldn't mind tuning in for extra, I really don't care to watch a double take for the extra 15min. It's probably all my fault, you probably said it clear as day. I just wasn't past early morning when I tuned in. BTW, you might want to be careful about how much of an EV evangelist you become. From experience, I have ridden a bicycle everywhere for over 10 years as primary transportation. I'm a hardcore roadie. People quickly tire from unexpected subjection to the evangelical...in my experience. At one point I worked 100km away, round trip, and did that commute for over a year, while training, racing and averaging between 300 and 400 miles a week. Even a small paycheck goes a lot further without a car payment, fuel, and insurance. I was also 350lbs in 2008 and under 190lbs at 6'1" by 2013. I could preach for days about the merits of a bike and possibilities, I've ridden in all weather, day and night, but if I get started, I realized I'm just preaching to myself. Now I just say, "I ride a bike because it is a change I can make. In the end, the only ethical or environmental question that matters is, "What can I change about me right now?" Everyone should ponder then honestly answer that for themselves. You're capable of more than you may think possible."
Yeah, I realised that issue, and probably should have been more clear. I can't put just the "extra" stuff on EEVdiscover because it's a standalone channel. I could have dumped the extra stuff on EEVblog2 but didn't see the point when I already have the full version on EEVdiscover. Main channel of course I want to keep the length down.
I'm a car guy, but also a huge fan of electric busses and trucks. Philly is full of noisy, smelly diesel busses and I can't wait to see them gone. You won't see me lamenting their death like say, an NA flat 6.
I owned a diesel truck for a short time. That stink put me right off, and the filth of having to maintain the thing, to the point where I gave up and sold the thing. Waiting for second hand electric trucks to become affordable before I revisit the "build my own houstruck" idea.
I wonder what those buses are worth second hand? Although it looks as though it'll be 20 years before I get to find out... that's ~7000 cycles (60% after 22k cycles or 8 years... I could live with that)
No emissions from the vehicles themselves but of course there is at source. The electricity production methods do pollute (except hydro). Imagine when at least 50% of vehicles are all electric. The infrastructure will have to be upgraded massively. More electricity stations, more charging points.
but even then: the efficiency of a large coal or gas power plant is much higher than burning diesel in thousands of tiny motors. Also emission control is much better in a power plant. And any other type of electricity generation - hydro, wind, solar, geothermal, ... - pollutes far less anyways.
More electric cars will actually make the grid more stable owing to V2G bidirectional charging. Infrastructure buildout is happening already. Rome wasn't built in a day. It takes time.
As long as the air pollution is somewhere else, transporting your goods, mining the earth's resources (for your batteries that need to be replaced every 10 years), and let's not forget the chemicals to make the plastics that will be around 10,000 years later. etc. Right? I roll my eyes when someone says they're buying a new electric car to "save the environment".
Go turn on your ICE car in your garage, or stand all day in the middle of a congested city and report back. Local air pollution is a HUGE problem that kills a lot of people. Electric cars and buses and truck solves that very real problem.
Getting minerals out of batteries is far cheaper than mining them. That's why EV battery recycling is starting to be developed. It's a shame that most computer & phone batteries aren't yet recycled. Still EVs are vastly cleaner than combustion in terms of the whole lifecycle
Tear it down Dave...Don't turn it on...Lets go...live your motto. BTW: Yea...no pollution...LMAO...massive strip mines that make some of these other open pit mines look tiny, production pollution, and more. Yea, yea, I get it...but believe me...what are we going to do when all these things start hitting landfills? Seriously, even Elon is stressed about the battery packs coming back now.
I think that's why Tesla is looking at a recycling plant as 99% of a battery is recyclable. Mining has been done since man first walked the earth, though. There's always some environmental impact from mining. But mining Nickel and Lithium is a lot less polluting than drilling for oil or fracking gas.
@@yggdrasil9039 Gotta do something...even then...BTW: "99%?" Nope..people will claim aluminum is "100% recycleable" it isn't. There is ALWAYS loss. ALWAYS. Same with copper, steel, etc. There is loss involved, always. What will the costs be? It still needs to be affordable. Recycling is EXPENSIVE. The battery recyclers have all stopped recycling Alkaline Batteries because it costs more to recycle them than what they get out of it. MUCH more. The plant that isn't too far from my house has gone so far as say about the only thing worth it right now is Li-Ion, and they said it costs a ton to do it...not a big profit margin. Going to be interesting moving forward to be sure.
424v x 108A = 45.7kVa - about 70 Amps per phase - for ONE bus. More than a three phase house supply right there. There's 100+ buses in that yard alone. If they were all electric, that's 4.5MW you have to find, just for one depot. Peak constant load, Every night, hour after hour. About equivalent to an entire zone substation for a medium sized suburb running full tilt all night at 66kV supply. GOOD LUCK. Do the MATHS people!!!
For comparison, 4.5MW would be the load of one small data centre and there are dozens of those scattered all around Sydney, and many that are much bigger.
@@stephanweinberger Lets get this straight - I am all FOR electric vehicles and YES, it can be done. But we need to get the facts straight about what's going to power them in environmental terms..
@@zordmaker Of course. But still we should not forget, that with *any* source of electricty, EVs are cleaner than ICE cars. The efficiency and emission control in power plants is just so much better, that even burning coal to power EVs is more environmentaly friendly than using diesel or gasoline in an ICE. But of course the goal should be 100% renewables - and we're slowly getting there, coal is slowly phased out as wind power has become cheaper to build and operate. Even solar is not that much more expensive any more. And of course hydro/pumped storage where available. Where no pumped storage is available we will still need gas powered peaker plants for the forseeable future, but those are much cleaner than coal as well.
Sorry to say but those things SUCK in colder climates. I bet they're good over there where you basically have infinite solar energy and all that jazz. They're expensive as frigg to keep running over here and we're just moving the pollution somewhere else. Great video nonetheless tho :)
Well said. They gotta mine, refine, and ship that aluminum, cobalt, lithium, etc, somewhere.Not to mention the chemicals to make the plastics that will be around 10,000 years later. You can just continue driving your car that's already made.
In those cold climates, it would make sense to heat your house using a CHP generator if you have access to heating fuel that's substantially cheaper than electricity.
Excellent video. Proper technical questions. Knowledgeable interviewees. Great.
This is a great video. I love that it's essentially a bunch of chill depot workers and Dave talking, not a bunch of governmet'y types that don't know what they're actually talking about.
THANK YOU to the australian transit company to be so open and generous showing everything! You are AWESOME!
Transit Systems Sydney
That's really forthcoming of them to let you see all their tech and answer all your questions. And it's not common that they dedicate so much time for a visitor. Well, I guess a relatively big/important company which is offering a public service like this is more likely or at least should be doing this but it's amazing that they're happy to do it for RUclips.
Really interesting video. Dreaming of a world of electric buses, electric cars, and people on bikes!
i live in Linz, a town in Austria with notorious traffic problems, and i m dreaming of the same thing! xD
Yeah! Imagine how quiet cities would become... people's voices will become noticable again, no more engines drowning the noises made by people and animals. It would improce quality of living by at least a few orders of magnitude.
Excellent video, excellent in deep technical interview, no stupid questions.
Seeing these busses go along my old route, living across from the Valhalla in the Glebe (Sydney) in the 80's, remembering the grime and smell, it makes me enthusiastic to think of the place quiet, clean and peaceful thanks to the future of electric vehicles. So much for our obsession with a dystopian future. Thank you for this fascinating, informative video.
Very cool video, never seen such a detailed walkthrough of the systems on a EV bus
Dave, that's an awesome video, thank you very much for it!
Detailed tear down of the E bus systems. Good stuff. Very informative. Let's hope NSW government can roll these out rapidly across the network.
We do also have electric busses (Denmark, Copenhagen) and some of them rather large (18 meter long) two part vehicles. The official plans is to replace most busses with electric models within a couple of years. We have been testing electric battery busses since 2014.
Really good Dave - do we all now agree that E is the way of the future, lol.
I NEVER even knew that we had E-buses in AU, but very happy to hear of their success in a pretty demanding environment.
Friendly note over the pond. When they say gas they mean gas, not gasoline.
Hey Dave good to see you again.
Love these discover videos.
Here in Paris we have 150 pure electric buses. Another 800 on order. Also 950 hybrid buses - helps a bit. That’s about 25% of the total, better than nothing, keep going!
You are getting ripped off. Ask city council for T_R_O_L_E_Y_B_U_S_E_S
@@ironman8257 I don’t think the cost of the line infrastructure required would be acceptable and I’m certain the visual impact of the wiring spaghetti would not be acceptable. We do have tramways that replace major car routes around the city where the infrastructure is less impacting on the visual environment.
What many may don't know and be surprised about, Poland now has Europe's biggest electric bus maker (50% of its units go abroad), and in the country there are currently 3 e-bus producers. The number is steadily increasing, and a year ago there were about 200 registered in several cities with further couple hundreds ordered.
no quick on-site teardown?
Don't touch the orange cables...! To (commercially) work on high voltage (SAE definition, not grid) EVs, people need quite the qualification, similar to the level of an electrician. Everyone else, even if just working on some other part of the vehicle need to be teached about the risks and how to avoid them.
We've had the RAC Intellibus here in Western Australia since 2016, fully electric autonomous bus, it goes to various parts of the state to give people a try of it.
This is awesome. Apparently they are spending $1.9 bn to upgrade the entire fleet.
Thanks for sharing. 😉👌🏼
Top Notch video. Thanks Dave.
Thanks Dave. I'm a bus driver and we have hybrids. They go full electric in the city centre,
Seen these busses quite a few times and always wondered what they were like to ride on. Sadly they don't yet go anywhere I want to go, it was great seeing such an in-depth review of them. Kudos to the team running the program and their enthusiasm shows, hope to see and be able to ride in them more often.
I don't know about pure EV cars(though I am extremely positive of Plug-in EVs) but inner-city busses and batteries are a perfect marriage. No noise in narrow streets, no local pollution, better at keeping up in heavy traffic, smoother ride, fewer chances of breaking down mid-journey.
Love the video and the presentation.
This is all very informative and interesting. Please come over to Melbourne and make the same sort of video for our electric buses. I haven't found any videos of this quality regarding our Melbourne ones.
I have to say the mechanic was very good, no uumm or aahh trying to think he knew the info. We got one of these in Melbourne the public love it, great bus.
I'm amazed how capable these buses are. I hope this inspires more cities to go electric.
We've got some off grid electric busses in Milan too, cool stuff
Electric buses have actually been around since the 1880s and especially since the mid 20th century and there are big fleets of them around the world, especially in Europe. You might know them as trolleybuses. What you're actually talking about here is battery electric buses, which are the same thing except that they operate independently and involve the environmentally detrimental process of manufacturing and disposal of batteries, not to mention extra weight and the issues associated with that.
So battery-electric buses are not perfect but better than having diesel buses but not as good as having trolleybuses. Nowadays, trolleybuses have smaller battery packs on board so that they can run either on-wire or off-wire with in-motion charging, which gives them almost as much flexibility as a diesel bus and an infinitely greater range than a battery-electric bus, hence little downtime. Because they are lighter due to not having those loads of batteries on board, they can also haul a full load of passengers, up to 100 in a 12 metre bus, compared to this Gemilang which has a capacity of about 60.
I note the huge aisle stairs at the back of that Gemilang bus. In Europe the electric buses have a fully stepless aisle (since obviously there's no longer an engine that has to go under the floor and the batteries are all on the roof), so that's a compromised feature that still needs improvement on these Australian models. There are further models currently being developed by Australian manufacturers so it's still a work in progress.
The #1 thing to do is just build trolleybusses. No environmental concerns, no recharging concerns, they’re perfect.
Great video Dave - absolutely love the Discover channel. Time for another video with Richard in Canberra perhaps?
Maybe when the new 70m dish is back in full action.
San Francisco has had electric buses in one form or another since 1935. Current day they have electric trolleys, diesel hybrid buses, completely electric buses, and cable cars. (Also some diesel buses.) The electric trolleys are preferred on the steepest grades where diesel buses can just not make it.
There is an autonomous bus running around part of the Foreshore in Perth for the last year or two. It's currently gone on holiday down to Busselton. It's an RAC WA project
We have one in Homebush here in Sydney
Amazing video! Loads of information tbh. I wonder though the value of 22000 battery cycles seems too high to be true!
Lithium Iron Phosphate batteries if used carefully should last a heck of a long time. I'd expect more than 8 years of of them with daily charging and not draining below 20%.
Will be interesting to see.
Professional RUclipsr... Laughed hard at that
Sounds like you're gonna have to buy Mrs EEVBlog an EV soon (to replace her "stinky car")
She wants one, but there is no large size full EV that would replace her 7 seat Dualis +2
@@EEVblog ironic! if electric buses exist, why no electric 7-seaters...?
@@RWL2012 they exist but they're monumentally expensive (model x would fit the bill but it's a millionaires only car :P)
very nice minidocumentary! :)
Excellent video!!! The knowledge gained from ur video is of a lot of help. Just one more thing the comparison between the cost of running per Kilometer between electric bus and a diesel bus/ gas bus wasn’t very clear but if u can comment and help that would be great. And last thing would solar panels actually help considering Sydney to be a sunny place
Here in Karlsruhe we have a hydrogen shuttle bus that was developed at our university to link our different campuses (campi?). It's actually quite good because that bus is driving around for 18 hours a day, without any pause to charge. The only issue is the lack of any hydrogen infrastructure anywhere in the world, so the uni also had to build it's own filling station. I believe the original plans even included directly electrolysing the rhine river, but that was never implemented unfortunately.
Electrolysing the Rhine river lol, that's like the global supply of H2 right there, and no more floods downstream!
I’m starting at the Leichhardt depot as a bus driver next week
any chance of another visit one year on ? - this was very interesting, thanks Dave
i’ll explain to you what has happened in 1 year: Transit Systems has around 14 electric buses. the extra 10 are yutongs which are ugly and sydney bus enthusiasts do not like them. Transit Systems still has the most electric buses out of any operator in sydney. They still have gas buses which won’t be replaced for another 10 years so the info in this video is not fully correct.
Why did you put this video on your Discover channel? Main channel or 2 channel at least!
It's on both, shorter version on main.
Can't wait for Dave pulling one of these out of the dumpster
Did two of these buses catch fire in 2021?
Great update on electric buses in Sydney. I am very interested in Vehicle to Grid (V2G) and virtual batteries for grid stabilisation. It seems to me that a bus fleet of some 800 vehicles at around say 300 kwh each could provide an enormous opportunity to use the fleet for V2G and grid stabilisation. In particular the usage profile of buses with two peaks demands then being parked for most of the day ( when the sun is shining and most of the night ( no solar) could mean they could be a huge virtual battery. I would good to know if State Transit are thing about V2G.
Bye the way a great video.
Thanks
It's great that a local energy source can power the buses, the sun, coal & wind & hydro
Far better than importing our fuel
I agree with your take on in-road dynamic charging. It is going to be massively expensive and not provide enough benefit. However wireless opportunity charging is being used to great effect by the Antelope Valley Transit Authority in California. They can get 250kW charge during their ten minute breaks. This can keep their busses going all day long where they would normally have to swap them out later in the day.
Here in Vienna we have some small Rampini city busses that use the tram catenary (or rather, special sections of wire directly connected to it, as they also need a current return path obviously) for recharging at the termini. www.flickr.com/photos/anurgaliyev/11837831765/
In isolated dedicated spots, sure. Along the entire bus lane is just a monumentally stupid idea.
Interesting watch, thanks :)
Also wondering how much does the lack of high heat, corrosive chemicals, fumes and vibration help with the lifespan of the vehicle.
My city has six electric buses. Since we get cold winters they have heated seats, I'm not sure if they have AC.
Very very interesting.
Did I hear him correctly at 20:17 - he said 0.01c ($0.0001) per km operating cost? Surely that's not possible? Did he mean $0.01?
Awesome 👍
Lucky Sydney for getting ACed Busses, where I live they simply left out the AC to make due with a smaller battery, one step forward and back again.
A new bus without air conditioning is practically banned here. Not one person in charge or customer would want that.
We've had electric buses here in Netherlands for a while now, the reduced vibration and noise (especially compared to the regular models when you sit on top of the engine area) is very noticeable.
With noise cancelling headphones there's not much left of the operational sound of those things, Id almost be okay with regular ones if it wasn't for a lot of other passengers (in normal non-pandemic times). The acceleration is a lot smoother as well. I did notice when they were new though that their brakes probably were a bit more agressive than what the drivers were used to and some drivers would accelerate faster than was comfortable for some standing people during a busy ride in the morning and late afternoon peak hours.
I think the ones I've seen around here are of the VDL Citea brand? Their charging contacts are at the top of the bus and can extend up to dock with charging infrastructure like this: www.vdlbuscoach.com/_cache/_public/VDL-Citea-SLFA-181-Electric_MKF3126_MR-small_cl8xNDAweDBfZF8xX2pwZ18vX2Fzc2V0L19wcml2YXRlL3NuaXBwZXQvMzAxNw_b4142abd.jpg
I'd like to see the long term maintenance cost of electric versus gas/petrol or diesel.
20:17 That's 1 dollar per 10000 km. Amazing.
Must've been that classic error...
Yeah, I got that as well.. 368 kwh, depending on your electric rate (I'll take $0.10/kwh), that's $36.80 per full charge, but they're only using about 60% of the charge, so that's about $23, they're going about 120kms in a shift so $0.18 /km, which isn't bad for a 15 ton bus
@@Rx7man That's 1800 times as much as what he claims.
@@Okurka. yup... I think my math is right? Local power costs may be a little different, but I think I'm in the ballpark
@@Okurka. Ooops, I guess I was wrong.. it's over $0.20.. www.globalpetrolprices.com/Australia/electricity_prices/
The only problem that I see vs the buses that are used in my country is passengers capacity. City buses here have a capacity of approx. 100-120 passengers.
I want to visit Woolloomooloo
Still funny how people think electric vehicles are zero emissions yet what does it take to produce them since you gotta mine for the materials used for constructing it
Great video, thanks. What does your wife drive? No worries about the focus, your videos are huge on very satisfying tech content. If they replaced a lot of that metal with carbon fiber it would be a lot lighter. The regenerative breaking numbers are really impressive. AS battery tech improves this situation will only get better.
Replacing with carbon fibre would be a lot more expensive
So how did the trial go? I guess in SF they under-specced the power units so they couldn't get up the hills :/.
the trial was successful and transit systems now has around 60 electric buses. Transit Systems have recently purchased some new australian buses which are much better then the ones shown in the video. they have the most electric buses in sydney with other company’s having either as little as 5 or none.
@@kfcwickedwings Glad to hear it!
@@macelius sorry this was my mistake but transit systems only has 14 electric buses. they have 41 models of this bus but in diesel form so the trial wasn’t successful with these ones but the new australian built buses ( Custom Coaches Element) may be. also note that the diesel models of these buses were purchased after this electric buses was delivered to leichardt depot.
edit: they also have another 28 but with a scania K310UB engine which is not electric, but the same model as the one shown in the video and was purchased very recently
i’m back as i have just found out that transport for nsw has banned all electric buses from being built overseas so no more of these yutongs or electric buses, only nsw built buses
Wow, I used to think that an electrical bus was something else altogether.
Most cars have more batt capacity than they state in the specs. They use the excess capacity to automatically compensates for any battery loss per year until the spare pool runs out. It's more about perception, if the purchaser sees the capacity fall in their 1 year old vehicle it doesnt look good for brand image.
And it allows higher manufacturing tolerances for a battery pack actual capacity/cycles.
@Ben Wilson It's not so much an excess pool that runs out, but a reserved buffer (typically some 3-5% of the actual capacity), as regularly charging Lithium batteries to 100% does dramatically reduce the durability. Hence you *will* recognize degradation immediately when it occurs.
@@stephanweinberger excess pool and reserve buffer mean the same thing.
Is electric bus quiet from outside? People living next to a bus stop will benefit from it I suppose.
I think all Diesel buses have been retired here now. The running buses are mostly LPG, partly CNG, partly Electric, and some Hydrogen.
if your talking about Sydney that is completely untrue. no LPG or Hydrogen buses in sydney, only CNG, electric and mostly diesel
@@kfcwickedwings I am not talking about Sydney.
that bus at 5:00 you were calling diesel is actually CNG
Solar is awesome, but this* (installing solar at the depot) is exactly one of those cases where the bus is being used constantly during peak insolation period...so not useful to charge the bus...but definitely excellent to offset the consumption of charging 70% of a 400kwh battery every night.
As solar vehicles go...a bus is one of the few cases where it almost makes a bit of sense to add several kw of solar to the roof. Info from solarelectricityhandbook.com Say you could fit 20m^2 of panels, in the dead of winter with flat panels and low sun in Sydney you'd get 2.5kwh/sqm/day = ~50kWh. Summer would be 6kWh/sqm/day = 120kWh So much depends on how long the bus would be in shadow, but is' free real estate. ....a least better than a f**king roadway.
You've got to weigh up the downsides of extra maintenance, extra weight, blockage of cooling vents, extra height against the slightly reduced energy drawn from the grid upon recharging. They couldn't make the batteries any smaller just because of the panels, because some days are just overcast... so I find it hard to believe that it'd ever work out to be economically sensible to put panels on the roof of a bus.
@@TheHuesSciTech agreed - had to preface with almost barely feasible.
Busses were charging when I was there, after the morning shift, so certainly they do get charged at peak insolation times.
@@EEVdiscover I figured your tour was special treatment... Very cool!
@@frollard Agreed in principle that solar roofs would be a great idea in Sydney but I don't think you'd get 2.5kWh from 1m^2. Unless I'm mistaken solar panels are about 1m^2 in size but generate at most 325W per hour.
Procurement policies here (Canada) would have a fit over buying busses made overseas so long as domestic factories produce them - even if fossil fuel powered. Will probably prevent the adoption of battery powered busses here for the foreseeable future due to the costs of upgrading the production infrastructure.
There are already at least 4 battery-electric bus plants in North America: BYD has facilities in Newmarket and California, New Flyer in New York, and Proterra in California. The TTC's currently running a 60 bus trial (the largest battery-electric bus fleet in North America, made up of 25 New Flyers, 25 Proterras and 10 BYDs), with plans to be 100% zero-emission by 2040.
150kW Hubmotors: 15:20
Dashboard: 28:00
Charging 32:20
We could have had electric buses with quiet rubber wheels driving down the major road in Sydney for a 100th of the cost of putting rails in on a metre of concrete and excluding other traffic. see Copenhagen thirty years ago.
Full electric is so much better, here in The Netherlands they have trials with hydrogen busses. Because there is no hydrogen infrastructure, they put them on diesel trucks and move them 100 km every night to refill them. Its like solar roads, they just never learn over here.
Bravo
EEVblog - *Eh*, I own an *EV*-blog :P
(Eletric busses are cool! I especially like the I2C bus.)
Dave you missed the yutong- 8083
channel 1 content
where'nt they talkin about electric busses for syd years ago? ...it would make sence to put solar roadways on the roofs of them busses...recharge em while they driving..or just sittin in the depo
the new tram system is all electric right?... that will get some busses outta the city
nice look into the guts!...good job Dave!..thanks!
You could fit what, maybe a few kW worth of panels on the roof? 328kWh pack, it's not going to really be of much practical benefit.
@@EEVblog true dat... but every little bit would help drive the operating costs down.. just like the regen..
Hey Dave have you Discovered the THETA network I think you would be able to make more money with THETA since it's token it with around $2 vs LRBY's 5 cents or whatever. I watch NASA's channel but I would breath watch yours. Thanks for reading.
ohhhh...! It's Chinese as there is "BYD" company name mentioned on the steering wheel.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BYD_Company
@@Android-ng1wn ,
does Australia build anything now ?
If somebody could say a sentence without saying "ahh" every time, that'd be a miracle, wouldn't it ?!
the whole chassis is BYD and the body is Gemilang. it's a "traditional" two-company body-on-chassis construction, as opposed to an integral bus.
Why shouldn't anybody be able to refill a gas bus LPG or butane anybody can get a supply of that doesn't make sense make a nice motor home. Do you have a lot of LPG petrol stations in Australia
At the strip Mines where the lithium are made the people mining it have numerous heath issues. Remember the batteries have to go somewhere
I cant wait to be able to get an electric car... Still rocking my 2000 Saturn wagon with 416,000 km on x.X
Dave,
Please make your main channel intro blurb about the exact diff between uploads more clear....I started watching pre-coffee. Perhaps it was the morning mental fog, but I got the impression this would be a long "extra cut," not an "extended cut." While I wouldn't mind tuning in for extra, I really don't care to watch a double take for the extra 15min.
It's probably all my fault, you probably said it clear as day. I just wasn't past early morning when I tuned in.
BTW, you might want to be careful about how much of an EV evangelist you become. From experience, I have ridden a bicycle everywhere for over 10 years as primary transportation. I'm a hardcore roadie. People quickly tire from unexpected subjection to the evangelical...in my experience.
At one point I worked 100km away, round trip, and did that commute for over a year, while training, racing and averaging between 300 and 400 miles a week. Even a small paycheck goes a lot further without a car payment, fuel, and insurance. I was also 350lbs in 2008 and under 190lbs at 6'1" by 2013. I could preach for days about the merits of a bike and possibilities, I've ridden in all weather, day and night, but if I get started, I realized I'm just preaching to myself. Now I just say, "I ride a bike because it is a change I can make. In the end, the only ethical or environmental question that matters is, "What can I change about me right now?" Everyone should ponder then honestly answer that for themselves. You're capable of more than you may think possible."
Yeah, I realised that issue, and probably should have been more clear. I can't put just the "extra" stuff on EEVdiscover because it's a standalone channel. I could have dumped the extra stuff on EEVblog2 but didn't see the point when I already have the full version on EEVdiscover. Main channel of course I want to keep the length down.
Hahahah that bloke saying diesel and deal, so aussie lol "dieuuusel"
I'm a car guy, but also a huge fan of electric busses and trucks. Philly is full of noisy, smelly diesel busses and I can't wait to see them gone. You won't see me lamenting their death like say, an NA flat 6.
I owned a diesel truck for a short time. That stink put me right off, and the filth of having to maintain the thing, to the point where I gave up and sold the thing. Waiting for second hand electric trucks to become affordable before I revisit the "build my own houstruck" idea.
I wonder what those buses are worth second hand? Although it looks as though it'll be 20 years before I get to find out... that's ~7000 cycles (60% after 22k cycles or 8 years... I could live with that)
Someone came up with a new theory of everything at theoryofgravity.org
LPG 4 Life, but alas...
I recommend owning at least one hybrid in 'stralia, at least I would dread the charging infrastructure of the empty bits in the middle.
Hybrid Rav4 was Australia's top selling car last month. Hybrids have arrived. Electric we are still going to be playing catch up for a while.
No emissions from the vehicles themselves but of course there is at source. The electricity production methods do pollute (except hydro).
Imagine when at least 50% of vehicles are all electric. The infrastructure will have to be upgraded massively. More electricity stations, more charging points.
but even then: the efficiency of a large coal or gas power plant is much higher than burning diesel in thousands of tiny motors. Also emission control is much better in a power plant.
And any other type of electricity generation - hydro, wind, solar, geothermal, ... - pollutes far less anyways.
More electric cars will actually make the grid more stable owing to V2G bidirectional charging. Infrastructure buildout is happening already. Rome wasn't built in a day. It takes time.
As long as the air pollution is somewhere else, transporting your goods, mining the earth's resources (for your batteries that need to be replaced every 10 years), and let's not forget the chemicals to make the plastics that will be around 10,000 years later. etc. Right?
I roll my eyes when someone says they're buying a new electric car to "save the environment".
Yeah no environmental considerations here.
It's still less pollution. The efficiency and emission control in a large power plant is *much* better than in thousands of small motors.
Go turn on your ICE car in your garage, or stand all day in the middle of a congested city and report back.
Local air pollution is a HUGE problem that kills a lot of people. Electric cars and buses and truck solves that very real problem.
Getting minerals out of batteries is far cheaper than mining them.
That's why EV battery recycling is starting to be developed.
It's a shame that most computer & phone batteries aren't yet recycled.
Still EVs are vastly cleaner than combustion in terms of the whole lifecycle
Tear it down Dave...Don't turn it on...Lets go...live your motto.
BTW: Yea...no pollution...LMAO...massive strip mines that make some of these other open pit mines look tiny, production pollution, and more. Yea, yea, I get it...but believe me...what are we going to do when all these things start hitting landfills? Seriously, even Elon is stressed about the battery packs coming back now.
I think that's why Tesla is looking at a recycling plant as 99% of a battery is recyclable. Mining has been done since man first walked the earth, though. There's always some environmental impact from mining. But mining Nickel and Lithium is a lot less polluting than drilling for oil or fracking gas.
@@yggdrasil9039 Gotta do something...even then...BTW: "99%?" Nope..people will claim aluminum is "100% recycleable" it isn't. There is ALWAYS loss. ALWAYS. Same with copper, steel, etc. There is loss involved, always. What will the costs be? It still needs to be affordable. Recycling is EXPENSIVE. The battery recyclers have all stopped recycling Alkaline Batteries because it costs more to recycle them than what they get out of it. MUCH more. The plant that isn't too far from my house has gone so far as say about the only thing worth it right now is Li-Ion, and they said it costs a ton to do it...not a big profit margin. Going to be interesting moving forward to be sure.
424v x 108A = 45.7kVa - about 70 Amps per phase - for ONE bus. More than a three phase house supply right there. There's 100+ buses in that yard alone. If they were all electric, that's 4.5MW you have to find, just for one depot. Peak constant load, Every night, hour after hour. About equivalent to an entire zone substation for a medium sized suburb running full tilt all night at 66kV supply. GOOD LUCK. Do the MATHS people!!!
For comparison, 4.5MW would be the load of one small data centre and there are dozens of those scattered all around Sydney, and many that are much bigger.
4.5MW is about the power usage of a single electric commuter train accelerating. No problem at all!
@@ickipoo Count'em on two hands mate. There are thousands of buses.
@@stephanweinberger Lets get this straight - I am all FOR electric vehicles and YES, it can be done. But we need to get the facts straight about what's going to power them in environmental terms..
@@zordmaker Of course. But still we should not forget, that with *any* source of electricty, EVs are cleaner than ICE cars. The efficiency and emission control in power plants is just so much better, that even burning coal to power EVs is more environmentaly friendly than using diesel or gasoline in an ICE. But of course the goal should be 100% renewables - and we're slowly getting there, coal is slowly phased out as wind power has become cheaper to build and operate. Even solar is not that much more expensive any more. And of course hydro/pumped storage where available.
Where no pumped storage is available we will still need gas powered peaker plants for the forseeable future, but those are much cleaner than coal as well.
If Mrs EEVblog is into electric cars, you should take her on a vacation to Norilsk Russia.
Nothing like thousands of people getting cancer to mine the nickel for those super eco friendly batteries.
What a boring job driving a soundless vehicle
The electric car still produces pollution. Brake pads and tires emit various stuff, so it's not exactly zero-emission.
Brake pads don't wear out much because of regenerative braking. The kinetic energy goes back into electrical energy.
Sorry to say but those things SUCK in colder climates. I bet they're good over there where you basically have infinite solar energy and all that jazz. They're expensive as frigg to keep running over here and we're just moving the pollution somewhere else. Great video nonetheless tho :)
They have winter in Australia too. And the temp does go below freezing.. Did you think it's summer all the time there or something?
@@markjohnson7887 Nothing like we have. Try -30 deg c
Well said.
They gotta mine, refine, and ship that aluminum, cobalt, lithium, etc, somewhere.Not to mention the chemicals to make the plastics that will be around 10,000 years later.
You can just continue driving your car that's already made.
In those cold climates, it would make sense to heat your house using a CHP generator if you have access to heating fuel that's substantially cheaper than electricity.
@@stevenm.2380 If I understood correctly, they are replacing old gas buses that would have needed replacement anyways
Wonder if the police are coming for that maskless guy.
Only in the state of Victoria. The rest of Australia isn't so dictatorial.