BYD pushed its Latin American sales total to 1,035 electric buses in 2019. The manufacturer accounts for 71 percent of the region’s electric bus sales. The largest fleet of 285 battery-electrics is on the roads of Chile. BYD said it will begin shipments of 379 electric buses to Bogota, Colombia, this year.
Thomas Built Buses will provide 50 Saf-T-Liner C2 Jouleys for the largest deployment of electric school buses in the U.S., the company announced. The buses will serve the first phase of an electric school bus replacement program in Virginia by the power utility Dominion Energy. The buses are powered by Proterra batteries and drivetrains.
Proterra has been certified as state vendor by the California Department of General Services to supply Proterra battery-electric buses and Proterra charging systems for the statewide contracts. The designation streamlines purchases by local transit agencies, universities and airports, which can acquire Proterra battery-electric buses and charging systems through the state’s pre-established contract. The contract provisions also may be used by agencies outside of California to simplify their purchases.
Transport for London, the city’s public transit agency, has announced the official sound of electric buses serving its residents. A contractor worked with the agency for more than a year to create sounds that will comply with a European Union law requiring electric vehicles to produce artificial sounds when traveling at low speeds to alert pedestrians and compensate for the lack of internal-combustion-engine noise.
The base sound is a pulsing F#maj7 chord playing at 56 decibels when the bus is stationary. When the bus begins moving, a C# note sounds over that chord every three beats. The sounds must be produced until the bus reaches 20 kilometers per hour, when tire and wind noises are sufficient for pedestrian safety.
Chinese manufacturer Yutong, which claims to be the world’s largest bus and motorcoach builder, has announced the sale of 88 of its E12 (12-meter long) electric buses to the Keolis Norge transit service for Bergen, Norway. Yutong also has sold 15 buses in Iceland, 20 in Denmark and 33 in Finland. The company sold 58,688 buses around the world in 2019—25,000 of them considered “new energy” buses. Yutong claims 32 percent of the Chinese bus market and 15 percent of the global market. Yutong’s factory has an annual capacity of 80,000 buses.
Volkswagen announced that it will reach its goal of producing 1 million electric vehicles annually in 2023. VW previously planned to reach that sales total by 2025 but now expects to produce 1.5 million that year.
Even beer: In November Anheuser-Busch reported its first delivery of a truckload of beer in St. Louis using a hydrogen-electric semi built by Nikola Motor Company and BYD. The brewery has ordered up to 800 of the trucks.
