Fully electric city buses: The viable option

Key challenges in traffic systems are carbon footprint of the vehicles, local emissions, noise and congestion. Fully electric city buses offer a solution to these challenges in public inner city transport. At the same time, electric buses open up for a lower total cost of ownership (TCO) provided that the vehicle, charging infrastructure and new operating concepts are designed and considered together. This is based on the fact that high utilisation rates of the expensive battery systems can be reached in commercial electric city bus operation, as opposed to private electric passenger cars. Fully electric city buses can be seen as the first market-based introduction of electrically-driven road vehicles which is justified both in commercial and environmental terms. This paper presents a TCO tool which incorporates the previous factors into a single TCO model and is anchored to component, vehicle and traffic system analysis. Consequently, the model can be utilised in investigating the most economically feasible charging infrastructures and vehicle technology concepts for further development of the electric bus city traffic. The model indicates that a combination of shared opportunity charging systems with possibly multimodal transport components, and fully electric buses with small but high power capable batteries will provide the lowest TCO. Such electric bus systems provide the best added value when operated on city lines and operation sequences with the highest utilisation.