Electric buses are awesome. They don't belch exhaust, they're super-quiet and they're a relatively easy way to get around town. But unless you're stringing overhead lines all over the place, the range sucks.
A Spanish firm has found a clever solution to that problem and is testing it in Umeå, Sweden.
Opbrid tweaked a Volvo 7700 bus to create the world's first fast-charging serial hybrid bus, "Arctic Whisper." It can be recharged in minutes at the end of each route, letting the fleet operator run it 18 hours a day.
The bus features a 100 kilowatt-hour Altairnano Valence lithium-ion battery that keeps the e-Traction hub motors turning for up to three hours. When the batteries run down, a diesel generator keeps juice flowing. Opbrid's clever range-extender works like this:
At the end of each route the driver pulls under a long metal bar called, appropriately, a Bůsbaar. The driver flips a lever, raising a pantograph that contacts the bar and charges the bus in 5 to 10 minutes, providing enough juice to to 10 or 15 kilometers. At the end of the day, the bus is plugged in at the bus barn. If anything goes sideways, the bus still has the diesel generator to provide power.
It took about six weeks to build the bus, which is called Arctic Whisperer because it's said to be so quiet passengers can hear each other even when whispering. The conversion was relatively straightforward. It required installing some batteries to operate the pantograph, rewriting the software and beefing up the charging system to handle the quick charge.
Umeå was a natural to test the technology because it is a university town with a lot of students who ride the bus. Diesel fuel and alt fuels like ethanol are expensive in Sweden, but the city gets a lot of electricity from hydro and wind. The city hopes to have several Arctic Whisperers on the streets by 2014, when it will be the Cultural Capital of Europe.
Photo and video: Opbrid
