The Dahme – Spreewald district is located in the south-east of Berlin. It covers a large area, bordering Berlin to the north and almost reaching Cottbus to the south-east. Berlin’s new airport in the municipality of Schönefeld is also located in the district. The largest town is Königs Wusterhausen with almost 40,000 inhabitants, which previously was the capital of the former Königs Wusterhausen district, until 1993 when it was merged into the larger administrative unit.
The district has its own public transport company, the ‘Regionale Verkehrsgesellschaft Dahme – Spreewald mbH (RVS)’, based in Luckau. The RVS was also created through the merger of two companies, namely the one responsible for the former district of Königs Wusterhausen and the company that operated in the southern part of what is now the Dahme-Spreewald district.
RVS has three depots in Luckau, Lübben and Mittenwalde (south of Berlin). It has 149 buses, mainly Iveco and Mercedes-Benz models, but there is also a ‘traditional bus’ in the form of an ‘Ikarus 250’ coach.
However, since 8 July 2025, the fleet has become much more ‘colourful’. On that day, RVS started the operation of 16 battery-electric, 12-metre-long vehicles of the ‘K 9 UD’ type from the Chinese manufacturer BYD based at its depot in Mittenwalde. This was preceded by a test of such a bus in the Königs Wusterhausen area last year, during which it was used, among other things, to transport pupils from the school for the blind in the town. The tests were successful, and RVS placed the order.
Now the vehicles have arrived. Contrary to what one might expect, they do not come from BYD’s European bus factory in Hungary. Horst Woitschig, BYD’s sales manager for Germany, Austria and Switzerland, explains that the buses were built in one of BYD’s three bus factories in China. Why is that? Probably because the Hungarian factory is ‘too full’: it is not without reason that BYD is planning to significantly expand the factory in Hungary and simply triple its capacity.
The new BYD K 9 UD in detail
The new BYDs of the RVS are 12,200 mm long, 2,550 mm wide and 3,300 mm high. They have 35 seats and 36 standing places. As with many buses today, the seats come from the German manufacturer Kiel. The middle door has a large ‘special use area’ for standing passengers, prams and passengers’ luggage. There is also a manually fold-out ramp here at the middle door. This is because the new BYDs can even carry electric wheelchairs, provided they are suitably secure. This means not only that they must be stable (so that they cannot tip over while the bus is moving), but also that they must be electrically secured.
The batteries for the vehicles come from BYD itself – which is no surprise, as BYD (based in Shenzhen, China) is originally an electrical engineering company that has always earned its money not least from the production of rechargeable lithium-ion batteries. At the beginning of this millennium, the company realised that, as an electrical engineering company, it manufactured everything it needed in-house to build electric cars and commercial vehicles. So, in January 2003, BYD Auto Co Ltd. was founded, which, not untypical for a company in this industry from China, very quickly developed into one of the largest manufacturers of electric vehicles worldwide. (Note: the company explains its name BYD with the English phrase ‘Build Your Dream’. In fact, however, the “Y” in the company name refers to ‘Yadi Road’ in Shenzhen. But for people outside China, the English phrase ‘Build Your Dream’ is much easier to understand …)
The new BYD electric buses from RVS have lithium iron phosphate batteries (LFP) with a capacity of 422 kWh, which are located on the roof of the buses. They give the vehicles a range of 450 kilometres, but BYD is cautious and has only guaranteed a range of 300 kilometres in the purchase agreement. However, RVS Managing Director Richter says: ‘The 300 kilometres are perfectly adequate for our daily operations in and around Königs Wusterhausen; no bus will be left stranded with empty batteries.’
The vehicles are purely depot chargers; recharging en route is not necessary. The connection between the power source and the bus batteries is established via cables and CCS combo plugs.
Operation of the new BYDs
The 16 new BYDs are stationed at the depot in Mittenwalde. They are to be used primarily for urban and interurban transport in Königs Wusterhausen. RVS Managing Director Siegfried Richter says that using them in and around the district’s largest town makes the most sense, as it is here in this densely populated area that the new buses can best demonstrate their advantages as zero-emission vehicles, and it is here that the environment can benefit most from them.
The future
Of course, RVS also wants to move away from buses with combustion engines for fossil fuels in the future. And towards emission-free buses. So the BYDs will not remain the only battery-electric buses at RVS. At least not in the northern district of Dahme-Spreewald. For the southern part of the district, however, the procurement of emission-free buses with a different drive technology is being considered, namely vehicles with hydrogen fuel cells that generate their own traction current through the reaction of hydrogen with oxygen in the air in the fuel cell. It is important for the environment that the buses are emission-free, regardless of how they achieve this. However, it may be advantageous for the transport company that the state of Brandenburg wants to develop the southern part of the district into a hydrogen region to compensate for the loss of lignite mining. ‘Then,’ says Managing Director Richter, ‘we would have the hydrogen right on our doorstep. No long transport routes, and we wouldn’t have to go to the expense of creating an electrical infrastructure for our buses.’
The demonstration run
The presentation of the new BYD at the Mittenwalde depot also included a demonstration drive lasting a good half hour. It led from Mittenwalde via Schenkendorf to the future location of Königs Wusterhausen and from there via Ragow and the A13 motorway back to Mittenwalde. The vehicle ran smoothly on the road, ‘ironing out’ bumps thanks to its good suspension and, typical of an electric bus, was ‘fantastically’ quiet. Build your noise-reduced dream. And on the motorway, it showed that it can also be fast.
