Canadian transit companies have completed the first phase of a ten-month trial of a 40-foot BYD battery-electric bus in Gatineau, Québec and Ottawa, Ontario. The evaluation was performed by the Société de transport de l’Outaouais (STO) in conjunction with AVT, a consortium of Québec’s nine transit corporations that evaluates zero-emissions public transit technologies. The test found that the bus’s average range was 250 km (155 miles), exactly what BYD advertised.

The range is a direct attribute of the sizing of the Iron-Phosphate battery, which has a total energy storage capacity of 324 kWh. BYD claims that when driven by an operator who understands the vehicle and how to optimize regenerative braking, the bus range could well exceed 250 km.

Efficiency was 1.3 kWh/km without air-conditioning and 1.5 kWh/km with air-conditioning, with full passenger loads. Although the bus drive is fully electric, in frigid weather heating was supplemented with a small diesel heater.

“The BYD electric bus was nothing like anything we had seen or tested before, it was able to run our required 8-hour shift in service with only a single night-time charge at our bus garage,” said Salah Barj, Director of Planning and Development at STO. “BYD’s bus has on-board chargers so that only 60 kW of grid AC power was delivered at night to the bus through a power interface. This made for very convenient charging of the electric bus so that no peak-rate power was consumed.”

Source: Green Car Congress