Electric buses have been visible on Mumbai’s roads in the last few months. The plans seems to be to put 340 electric buses on the road by early next year. That is about 10% of the fleet. Quite a fraction of the new buses seem to have been deployed already. I haven’t been in one yet, but they are supposed to have 60 seats, and space for 30 standees (there’s another version with 25 seats). A friendly new feature is a mechanism to lift wheel chairs into the bus, or lower them to the road.
Yesterday my taxi was held up for a minute while this but backed into a parking bay on a narrow road. I clicked the photo you see here, and looked up the technical specifications. In normal use the engine uses about 150 KW from a Lithium battery which stores 186 KWh of energy. That rating should give nearly 100 hours of run. I suppose the reality is more restrictive, because according to the BEST (Brihan-Mumbai Electric Supply and Transport corporation) press handout, the batteries are supposed to last 200 Kms on city roads in a single charge. The bus is fully electric, from start to stop, and has no clutch or gear control. The company lists in-bus utilities like charging points for users and WiFi on the go, but the BEST press release does not mention them. I guess I will have to check these out when I ride the buses.
I was surprised to find that these buses have already run over 4 million Kilometers on city roads, in various cities. There are hybrid electric buses already running on intercity routes. These are the visible results of the government’s scheme, FAME, for Faster Adoption and Manufacturing of Electric vehicles in India, started in 2015. If these emission-free and (relatively) noise-free buses turn out to have a lifetime of 15 years, like the older buses on the roads, then it will be a rather nice and big change.