Great catch-up potential for eMobility in public transport

Around a hun­dred thou­sand diesel bus­es are still on Europe’s roads with out­dat­ed tech­nol­o­gy. At the same time, the num­ber of e‑buses is ris­ing sig­nif­i­cant­ly. It is hard­ly sur­pris­ing that elec­tro­mo­bil­i­ty is on the rise. After all, the call for sus­tain­able mobil­i­ty is get­ting loud­er and loud­er. With the MAN Lion’s City 12 E and the all-elec­tric 18 E artic­u­lat­ed bus, MAN Truck & Bus offers the right solu­tion for the urban trans­port of the future.

Elec­tro­mo­bil­i­ty is elec­tri­fy­ing more and more peo­ple. This is clear­ly demon­strat­ed by the ris­ing reg­is­tra­tion fig­ures for e‑cars. But e‑mobility is not only gain­ing momen­tum in pri­vate trans­port. In pub­lic trans­port, too, more and more oper­a­tors are turn­ing to e‑vehicles, as recent fig­ures from the umbrel­la orga­ni­za­tion of Euro­pean vehi­cle man­u­fac­tur­ers (ACEA) show. Based on bus reg­is­tra­tion fig­ures, the asso­ci­a­tion report­ed that sales of elec­tric bus­es in the Euro­pean Union increased by 18.4 per­cent in 2020 com­pared to 2019. The share of diesel engines, on the oth­er hand, decreased by almost ten per­cent (source: “ACEA bus­es by fuel type full-year 2020,” 30 March 2021).

“Over­all, the total Euro­pean mar­ket for elec­tric bus­es was more than 2,000 vehi­cles last year. And the trend is clear­ly upward. We expect half of all new city bus­es to be alter­na­tive­ly pow­ered by 2025.”

- Rudi Kuch­ta, Head Busi­ness Unit Bus

Despite the ris­ing eBus num­bers, diesel bus­es are still by far the most com­mon on EU roads. Accord­ing to ACEA, there were a total of more than 690,000 bus­es in 2019, with an aver­age age of 11.7 years — 94.5 per­cent of which were pow­ered by diesel, and 0.6 per­cent pure­ly elec­tric (source: ACEA Report “Vehi­cles in use Europe,” Jan­u­ary 2021). “The fig­ures and our expe­ri­ence show that elec­tro­mo­bil­i­ty is on the rise. At the same time, they also make clear what great poten­tial it still holds. Replac­ing diesel bus­es with out­dat­ed tech­nol­o­gy with mod­ern elec­tric bus­es will help enor­mous­ly to reduce CO2 emis­sions,” says Kuch­ta, adding, “This is a key build­ing block in tack­ling cli­mate change.” After all, with an annu­al mileage of 50,000 to 60,000 kilo­me­ters and a con­sump­tion of 36 to 49 liters per 100 kilo­me­ters, which varies depend­ing on use, topog­ra­phy and vehi­cle vari­ant, an eBus trav­el­ing with zero local emis­sions can save around 60 to 80 tons of CO2 per year — com­pared to a diesel bus and assum­ing the cur­rent elec­tric­i­ty mix.

The bus is already con­sid­ered the most envi­ron­men­tal­ly friend­ly and eco­nom­i­cal means of trans­port. How­ev­er, local pub­lic trans­port oper­a­tors and munic­i­pal­i­ties have it in their own hands to cut CO2 emis­sions even more and thus con­tribute to cli­mate pro­tec­tion. The Euro­pean Union has also rec­og­nized this and passed the Clean Vehi­cle Direc­tive. This pro­vides for bind­ing emis­sion stan­dards in munic­i­pal fleets — the leg­is­la­tion has been in force since August 2021. Cities must thus set their course for emis­sion-free mobil­i­ty. The goal: to move from “low emis­sion” to “no emission.”

“More and more pub­lic trans­port com­pa­nies have under­stood this and are rely­ing only on bat­tery-pow­ered city bus­es for new pur­chas­es. Or they are set­ting clear time tar­gets for con­vert­ing the entire fleet to zero-emis­sion dri­ves,” says Kuch­ta. One exam­ple is Verkehrs­be­triebe Ham­burg-Hol­stein (VHH), which has been procur­ing only local­ly emis­sion-free, bat­tery-pow­ered bus­es since 2020. The goal is to con­vert the entire bus fleet to zero-emis­sion dri­ves as far as pos­si­ble by 2030.

In order to pro­vide trans­port com­pa­nies with the best pos­si­ble sup­port on their way to zero-emis­sion mobil­i­ty, the com­pa­ny offers an over­all con­cept that brings togeth­er holis­tic eMo­bil­i­ty con­sult­ing and tai­lored, for­ward-look­ing solu­tions. Because for MAN, too, the future of urban mobil­i­ty is elec­tric. “We are con­vinced that elec­tro­mo­bil­i­ty is the key tech­nol­o­gy for com­mer­cial vehi­cle trans­port of the future. For this rea­son, we are con­stant­ly dri­ving tech­nolo­gies and progress for­ward togeth­er with our cus­tomers,” says Rudi Kuch­ta. The focus here is on the MAN Lion’s City E — and thus the all-elec­tric solu­tion for pub­lic transport.

For months now, the MAN Lion’s City E has been demon­strat­ing in more and more cities through­out Europe how excel­lent­ly it mas­ters urban traf­fic and how eas­i­ly it can be inte­grat­ed into exist­ing process­es. Dur­ing an MAN eBus test dri­ve that took place in Munich in May of this year, it also cracked the 550-kilo­me­ter mark under real­is­tic every­day con­di­tions with just one bat­tery charge. “The issue of range plays an essen­tial role for our customers.

After all, on lines that were pre­vi­ous­ly served by a sin­gle vehi­cle with an inter­nal com­bus­tion engine, only one elec­tric vehi­cle will be on the road in the future. Dur­ing the MAN Effi­cien­cy Run, our eBus impres­sive­ly demon­strat­ed how suit­able elec­tric mobil­i­ty already is for every­day use,” says Kuch­ta. Even with a real­is­tic range of “only” 400 kilo­me­ters in reg­u­lar oper­a­tion, the bus could cov­er 98 per­cent of the routes served by MAN cus­tomers with­out inter­me­di­ate charg­ing. And it would then be charged in the depot — with the advan­tage that oper­a­tors would not have to invest in addi­tion­al charg­ing infra­struc­ture in the city area.