JAC Motors, a Volkswagen-backed Chinese automaker, unveiled the first mass-produced EV with a sodium-ion battery through its new Yiwei brand. Although sodium-ion battery tech has a lower density than lithium-ion, its lower costs, simpler and more abundant supplies and superior cold-weather performance could help accelerate mass EV adoption.
Where I live they recently bought a bunch of electric and hybrid public buses.
Hope they simply bought trolley buses and didn’t waste money on battery buses
It’s such a waste to put batteries in inner city buses
Yeah, and the cables would install themselves automatically.
That’s better than the buses breaking down.
https://youtu.be/B78-FgNqdc8?si=1dMORMc1EYhA6abL
Sorry but youtube experts and their google research are not a reliable source of information for me. It’s entertaining but it’s the last thing I would base city planning on.
Trolley buses are a weird niche. They require permanent overhead cable infrastructure like trams do but don’t have the other benefits of trams - higher capacity, greater speed, better ride and no tyre pollution. I figure if you’re going to install a trolley bus route you probably might as well install rails at the same time and get the benefits of trams. (Aka streetcars for the North Americans out there)
The City of London did assessments on trolley buses and found that the added capacity of trams made them the better choice pretty much anywhere trolley buses were proposed, despite the slightly higher install cost.
Actually electric buses make a lot more sense, as the utilisation and environmental impact would be much greater compared to normal EV cars.
Plus you are conveniently omitted mentioning the energy losses of the cables, the maintenance cost, the installation cost, etc.
id be genuinely surprised if the energy losses of the cables are more than the energy losses of charging the batteries even if they are they are more than likely offset by the weight difference of batteries vs the weight of the cable connecting mechanism.
Then there is the issue of range and the uptime of the vehicles while you can use a trolley 24/7 you have to charge the bev buses
Then there is the issue of extreme weather cold or hot where due to AC and or heating and the temperature itself affects the range a lot
Then there are the maintenance costs of the battery the power capacity since you need space for the batteries
So all in all you exchange a bunch of negatives for the benefit of not needing overhead cables
A trolley with a small built in battery for those last few miles you might need to connect but don’t want to pull cables is the best of both worlds.
Hope that was a comprehensive enough dismantling.
Source for your claims?
Plus do you know how expensive it is to support the whole cable infrastructure, including personnel salaries, etc. I am not convinced your math is right, but feel free to prove me wrong.
My city recently decided to pull down the existing overhead cable network in favour of ‘local’ batteries in buses (was aging and needed a lot of maintenance which they were allergic to)
Unfortunately, that doesn’t really argue either way, as same city is now seeing the issues of not maintaining it’s water infrastructure for the last recent decades… They do some dumb shit
What do you think cables are made of? Gold? Lol
What do you think is more expensive maintaining the cable infrastructure or the road surfaces under the extra heavy buses?
Here is a good youtube video on the issue
https://youtu.be/B78-FgNqdc8?si=fIy93Q8QPqTwRorV
I am sorry but since when do we consider YouTube as a credible source? I am looking at scientific peer reviewed proof, not someone’s video on the matter.
Not to mention how unbelievably ugly stringing that shit all over the service area is. Electric buses make a ton of sense.