A message from the legendary Californian Silicon Valley: Proterra, US specialist for electric commercial vehicles, delivers ten electric buses of its new type ZX5 to “British Columbia Transit (BCT)”, the province-owned transport company in the Canadian province of British Columbia. The vehicles are 40 feet long – that is 12.17 metres.
The ZX 5 is the fifth generation of Proterra’s “Catalyst” city bus model. Its body o is made of lightweight materials, namely fibreglass (plastic) and balsa wood. Clearly, if the body doesn’t weigh much, the bus doesn’t have to spend a lot of energy moving its own weight around.
The batteries are located in the rear on the roof. They can come with a storage capacity of up to 675 kWh, giving them a range of 530 kilometres (329 miles). So in terms of range, Proterra is right up there with its electric buses. And as early as next year, i.e. 2023, Proterra plans to deliver the ZX5 with a storage capacity of 738 kWh. Another 63 kWh: will a range of almost 600 kilometres be realistic then…? It was not so long ago that people here in Europe expressed their concerns that a range of 200 kilometres was really “the end of the line”, the maximum potential for battery developments in the future.
Proterra announces that the extremely flat battery packs can be configured according to the individual wishes of the customer. They can be charged in three ways: on the line with pantograph rising from the bus to the charging station, on the line with inverted pantograph lowering from the charging station to the bus, and in the depot via CCS combo plug (over-night-charging). In a video, Proterra explains that in view of the range of the ZX5, something other than over-night-charging at the depot is actually no longer necessary. However, in the USA and Canada, distances are sometimes great, so it could happen that, despite the enormous range of the batteries, it is not enough for the bus to go back and forth in long-distance transport.
27.05.2022
