Do ‘green’ buses pass the performance test?
Years ago I had a chat with a city bus operator. We have some electric busses here in Vienna so I wanted to know how happy he was with them. He told me that the defining problem is that they need to recharge the battery far more often than anticipated. The reason is that busses spend most of their life on one particular line. As batteries are expensive, Electric Busses are bought to specification. This means that their batteries are tailor-made for the purpose they are supposed to serve. The problem is that every battery starts a cycle of ever worse performance with every single recharge. Imperceptibly small at first, it becomes a perceptible problem quite soon. But once this reaches a certain level, the bus cannot complete its tour anymore on one charge. Either you change the battery or you build more recharging stops and change schedules. All onerous.
