More than 700 electric buses already ordered

At MAN Truck & Bus, busi­ness with elec­tric bus­es is pick­ing up sig­nif­i­cant­ly. More than 700 elec­tric bus­es have already been ordered since the Lion’s City E went on sale. The lat­est order for a total of 53 of the all-elec­tric city bus­es has now come from Ham­burg. But sev­er­al of the eBus­es are already in use — through­out Europe.

Since the sales launch of the Lion’s City E in 2020, MAN has signed con­tracts with cus­tomers for the deliv­ery of more than 700 elec­tric bus­es. In the past fis­cal year, the Lion’s City E sold by MAN in Europe account­ed for around 5.5 per­cent of all over 2,400 city bus­es. In Ger­many, this puts the com­pa­ny in third place in terms of eBus­es reg­is­tered in 2021.

“How­ev­er, our goal is quite clear: to put even sig­nif­i­cant­ly more elec­tric bus­es on the road: By 2025, half of our new city bus­es will be alter­na­tive­ly pow­ered. And we expect that just five years lat­er — in 2030 — 90 per­cent of our city bus­es will be battery-powered.”

- Rudi Kuch­ta, Head of Bus Busi­ness Unit

Very recent­ly, the Group received two orders for a total of 53 eBus­es from Ham­burg. Ham­burg­er Hochbahn AG, for exam­ple, ordered the elec­tric bus­es for the first time, with a total of 17 Lion’s City 18 E vehi­cles. The first vehi­cles will be deliv­ered this year. The sec­ond order from Ham­burg comes from Verkehrs­be­triebe Ham­burg-Hol­stein GmbH, which has thus opt­ed for these eBus­es for the third time. The cur­rent order com­pris­es 30 eSolobus­es and 6 eArtic­u­lat­ed bus­es. Deliv­ery of the first bus­es is sched­uled for this year.

How­ev­er, many more ordered eBus­es will also be deliv­ered soon. Some of them are already in use — such as the 39 eBus­es of VAG Verkehrs-Aktienge­sellschaft Nürn­berg. The com­pa­ny ini­tial­ly ordered 15 and then, as part of a fol­low-up order, a fur­ther 13 Lion’s City 18 E and 11 Lion’s City 12 E. A total of 15 eBus­es will also be on the road in Zurich, Switzer­land, on stan­dard urban bus routes from fall 2022. Verkehrs­be­triebe Zürich (VBZ) is pur­su­ing a con­sis­tent elec­tric bus strat­e­gy and has opt­ed for the Lion’s City 12 E as part of this strategy.

The eBus­es have also been in oper­a­tion in Copen­hagen since Feb­ru­ary: the 25 Lion’s City 12 E bus­es are used on Copen­hagen’s cen­tral bus line 7A, which car­ries more than 4.3 mil­lion pas­sen­gers each year. To make urban trans­porta­tion as sus­tain­able as pos­si­ble, the city bus­es are charged exclu­sive­ly with green elec­tric­i­ty. Twelve more eBus­es were also recent­ly deliv­ered to Viking­bus in Odd­er. This means that 37 elec­tric bus­es are now mak­ing their rounds on Dan­ish roads.

In neigh­bor­ing Swe­den, the MAN Lion’s City E also ensures sus­tain­able mobil­i­ty. KEOLIS has ordered a total of 75 Lion’s City 18 E for Swe­den: 60 elec­tric artic­u­lat­ed bus­es are going to Gothen­burg and 15 to Stock­holm. In addi­tion, anoth­er 12 Lion’s City 18 E will soon be run­ning in Upp­sala, Swe­den. The frame­work agree­ment with Gam­la Upp­sala Buss includes an option for a fur­ther 65 elec­tric bus­es — 45 of them Lion’s City 18 E and 20 Lion’s City 12 E solo bus­es. In addi­tion, 22 Lion’s City E bus­es in the coastal city of Malmö in the south­ern Swedish region of Skåne demon­strate how excel­lent­ly they can cope with urban traf­fic and how eas­i­ly they can be inte­grat­ed into exist­ing oper­a­tions. They are oper­at­ed by Nobi­na Sverige AB. “There is enor­mous inter­na­tion­al inter­est in for­ward-look­ing dri­ve tech­nol­o­gy,” says Kuchta.

Sophisticated technology, long range

MAN has com­plet­ed its new gen­er­a­tion of city bus­es with the all-elec­tric Lion’s City E, a zero-emis­sion vari­ant. Series pro­duc­tion of the 12-meter solo ver­sion start­ed in Octo­ber 2020 at the Pol­ish plant in Stara­chow­ice. The all-elec­tric Lion’s City 18 E artic­u­lat­ed bus went into series pro­duc­tion in April 2021. This offers space for up to 130 pas­sen­gers, the solo bus for up to 88 pas­sen­gers. For the dri­ve sys­tem, the Group relies on a cen­tral motor on the rear axle in its eBus or two cen­tral motors on the sec­ond and third axles in the artic­u­lat­ed bus, which ben­e­fits dri­ving per­for­mance. The ener­gy for the all-elec­tric pow­er­train comes from the bat­ter­ies on the vehi­cle roof. The elec­tric bus­es offer a range of up to 350 kilo­me­ters under favor­able con­di­tions over the entire ser­vice life of the batteries.