Hi, How can you spot an electric car owner? Well, you don't have to, I'll tell you. as you've seen a recent video. Yes, I'm now the owner of an electric car and they're awesome And after driving it for a couple of weeks now, uh, there's basically three things I really notice. One is the complete lack of essentially the complete lack of noise.

The only noise you get is from the road tires basically. Uh, the second is that it's very smooth. There's no vibration from the motor when you idle at the lights. When you stop at lights, it's just like complete dead silence.

It's absolutely brilliant. But the third and most important I think um, and Mrs. E V blog agrees is that there is just no pollution at all. You can't smell them.

We just get so used to existing internal combustion engine cars. You know you're loading your kids, the engines running, You're loading your kids into the car, It takes forever and the car's filling up. You know, even though it's just sitting there, it's just filling up with the fumes and you're just choking on it so you don't really notice it until you drive your electric car. And then you go hop in to your old internal combustion car and just go.

Ah, this is terrible. Mrs. Evie blog called now calls her car the stinky car because it yeah, they just stink. So getting rid of like air pollution is one of the big things.

Yeah, we can talk about global warming and all you know, Co2 emissions and all that sort of stuff. But a really important thing that can make a tangible difference. Now to everyone, everyone's lives, including saving lives because a lot of people die from air pollution. Here's the thing.

The Australian Institute of Health report in 2011: 3 000 premature deaths each year result of air pollution. About half that comes from transportation. I believe the figures like even higher than that. That basically most air pollution in cities comes from vehicles, cars, buses, trucks, and you're just breathing.

All this stuff in Absolutely terrible for your health. And this is where electric cars come in. no emissions. So your cars, and your trucks, and your buses.

they all emit, uh, you know, petrol, diesel, gas. Whatever it is, they all emit, um, all sorts of horrible stuff. You're talking carbon, dioxide. you're talking nitrogen oxide, particulate matter, and benzenes.

All sorts of crap just spewing into the air. Absolutely terrible for your health. So to me, this is one of the most important benefits of electric car is just cleaning up the air that we breathe every single day. So anyway, everyone's talking about electric cars, right? They're the hot new thing, and rightly so.

they're awesome. Uh, highly recommend you get one if you can afford. It's still quite expensive. Anyway, I had no idea that electric buses were actually a huge thing.

There's almost like half a million electric buses in the world. Unfortunately, you don't hear about them because like 90 95 percent of them are in China. because China of course, has a huge pollution problem and they're trying to solve that with electric buses. But I had no idea Australia actually runs some electric buses as well.

And for the last 12 months, we had an electric bus trial right here in Sydney, Um at a company called uh, Transit Systems I. I saw this on the news and I thought, oh, wow, Electric buses? That's cool. I'd love to check those out. So these four electric buses have been running on real routes around Sydney, Um for the last 12 months and apparently it's been a big success.

So I thought I'd contact Transit Systems see if we can get a look at this and they said yeah, no worries, drop on by and we'll show you the electric bus. So when they've got four buses, um, 16 hours? uh, like run time on these things so they can do a couple of shifts easily and you know they've got gigantic batteries in them order of magnitude bigger than my Hyundai Ioniq, Let me tell you, we'll see that in a minute. So they've been running these routes here in Sydney and there's all the charging stuff in the back, so I thought it'd be cool to check these out. So let's go to the Transit Systems depot here in Leichhardt.

Let's go! Oh, and I did shoot this intro actually driving to Transit Systems in my electric car. I thought that would be cool, but unfortunately my um Rx Zero Mark Ii camera um shot doesn't have auto focus so it I must have accidentally focused on my arm when I pressed record and it the whole thing's out of focus. so so yeah. I got like 15 minutes of out of focus footage yeah professional Youtuber and this is actually going to be a cut down version of the video.

I have the full version over 40 minutes long over on my Ev Discover channel linkedin down below, so go check that out! I've got lots of other cool videos over there too. If you're not subscribed to Eev, Discover, you should be. And here it is a fully electric bus. one of four on trial here in Sydney.

Well, there's actually a fifth one which is a different brand. But where's the branding? Where's the electric bus branding guys? It's yeah. Okay, it's zero emissions, but there's no electric bus branding. but it's fully electric.

Let's go check it out. And manufactured by Demi Lang and you can hear probably a very noisy uh diesel bus. but here we go. these are fully electric.

One of the advantages is is that they're completely silent. So well manufactured by Byd. They got the brand in on the uh steering wheel there and we can have a closer look but uh, apart from that it's just a regular bus. You wouldn't know the difference.

Fully air conditioned. in fact, the the air conditioner on this uses a ton more energy than my fully electric car does. So there you go. We've got social distancing stickers.

Sit here. Sit here. sit here. Thank you very much.

But uh, yeah, you wouldn't notice a difference. apart from there's no emissions, so these things don't smell, There's no, uh, you know, motor vibration things like that. And they're completely silent, which is absolutely fantastic and just a generally a smoother ride. And here's the back.

This is the business and what we want to see. And I'm here with Andrew. He's the leading hand. He's going to tell us all about it.

Andrew, Take us for a walk through. Yeah, cool start at the top. Uh, we have the high voltage distribution box main isolator. This is the most important thing if we're working on them, we've got to disconnect them otherwise we're going to be fried.

So this is the main inverter here. Yeah, so this is your Dc to Dc charger so that puts power into low voltage side left and right. We have the vehicle to grid or motor controllers. They put power from the batteries into the motors depending on vehicle demand and also power from the grid into the batteries and these two black boxes on the side.

That's just a simple cooling system. for the motors. They run an oil cooler with a with a coolant um, returning to two radiator fans just on the side. Here below that we have our air compressor basically that just runs on a Uh on a motor and the system runs like any other heavy vehicle pneumatics.

So instead of running from a belt from a regular motor, it's running uh from the battery, pneumatic, brakes, suspension, doors, um, that sort of thing. And on the left hand side, we have our power steering system. So again, this is a little power steering pump. Uh, driven by a motor that's electric.

obviously? Um, on a conventional vehicle, it's driven gear driven from the motor and then obviously either side you have your radiator fans to to for your this is just calling for the motor. The batteries have a separate cooling system up top, which which is sort of a sealed unit. How do they call the battery? It's uh, do they pump uh, some sort of fluid through them? Yeah, right. And that that's a separate system that's that's isolated from from.

This is just the motor. and then all these modules up here are just the various Uh modules to to relay the information you know, uh, throttle demand, and vehicle loading and that sort of thing, right? Uh, Are there any data loggers in here for monitoring? Uh, the Yes systems. They're fitted with a a data logger that takes the Uh information from the vehicle system and Uh relays that via a Uh for a cell Sim card, right? right? Okay, so they come back in uh, real time from the bus as well. Yeah, so we can see state of charge, motor controller, motor controller, and motor temperatures.

Uh, vehicle speed? I mean even down to how many passengers? So how does this Uh chassis differ from a Uh a diesel one? Is this like the same physical back where the diesel motor would go? No, I think the chassis would be made specifically for the Uh to house all of this stuff. So far as your your front axle, that's standard heavy vehicle. it's a Zf front axle, Your brakes. uh, I think they're nor Bremshi suspension.

You know they're all sort of webco and and you know, off-the-shelf type heavy vehicle industries type stuff. Believe that power steering pumps the Zf as well. and then I guess the Gamma lane make the body. so they do all the interior fit out with with whatever spec the customer wants.

So from a maintenance uh, point of view, how does an electric bus differ after a year you've had? You've been maintaining these things for a year. What is the difference? Uh, we don't have to change gender at all. But I mean so far is maintenance on brakes. You do still have to do brake inspections.

so it's checking your pad wear. We are seeing significantly less pad wear and that's probably due to the regenerative braking. so that's fantastic. How much regen braking would you typically get? We've seen up to 30 percent right on a trip.

Um, that does differ obviously. Sydney. Yeah, if you're going up and down hills, you might get a bit more. But yeah so far is like your hubs so your reduction drives and your hubs.

they need have their oils changed every six to 12 months. Um, Power steering? All you know that's that gets changed at an interval. I think that's 12 months. We don't have a motor in here.

Where is it Not In the back there? They're hub motors. They're on the on the wheels. They're actually on the wheels. Well, so you've got your your hub and then you've got a reduction and then you've got your motor bolted straight.

It's right next to it. So just the rear wheels. Just the rear wheels. Yeah, right.

No, no. all wheel drive here. You got it. Why, Why did they put them on the rear and not the front? It's just easier I would say Definitely.

Uh, definitely space. Um, the logistics of having a steer axle that's also a drive axle. Um, a lot less moving parts and a lot less hassle. I see over here.

the charger behind you there. That is a Type 2 Ac charger. Is it not? Ah, yes it is. So there are two ports and they go to the two vehicle-to-grid units that then transfer that power to the batteries.

You've got batteries up on the roof and we've got I believe it is two battery packs. Uh, underneath. Okay, you needed that for the extra range. Uh, yes.

But I would have thought having the batteries on the top would be a weight issue. It'd be a pendulum issue. Uh, not so much. Our gas buses have weight on the roof and they handle that very, uh, very well.

But yeah, again, that was done in the design. The Byd designed the vehicle the best distribution of weight. Uh, with their battery packs. All right.

Tell us about the batteries in this thing. There's two batteries. Yes, we have the ones on the roof and one's underneath. They are a lithium-ion phosphate battery.

At 368 kilowatt hours, that's 10 times more than my Hyundai Ioniq car. That's 10 times the battery capacity. How much does the Ionic weigh? You know, a ton and a half? maybe? Yeah, Well, this is pushing close to 18 and a half. Done.

18 and a half ton bus. 18 and a half ton. Wow. And how much did the batteries weigh? They weigh two and a half ton, two and a half ton each.

or total total total. So there's one down the bottom there, so there's one down at the bottom and then the other ones. The main ones are off on the roof. standard like suspension, so they've got like a sway bar.

Leaks sort of prevent the body roll. Um, it's not really an issue. Okay, so I assume they mount on the top just because the well, the weight has to be distributed along the chassis, but they probably didn't have room under the front of the bus. No, and you obviously want to keep your clearance.

Vehicle clearance, Vehicle clearance. There are more up the top than there are down the bottom right. And what else have we got on the roof here? Uh, you've got your Ac system. Our Ac system is a Tke 1200 unit.

Okay, the maximum power consumption is 11 kilowatts of power from the bus batteries. when running full cooling. that's with all the fans on high speed. it is 3.7 when the compressor is running at minimum capacity.

with fans at low speed 3.7 to 11 just for the aircon to keep the passengers happy. You know. Wow. In the in, the uh, the heat of the heating of Australian Sydney summer.

Uh, they get quite hot. And what is the uh, that low profile thing along the top there? Uh, that's that is your Ac? Yeah, so that'll have your condenser units and and all your other gas for the aircon. And you've got a different charger on this side here. Why is that charger different to the one on the other side? Uh, that's for a different model.

A different model. You've got one other different model. Yes, we have a U-tom and that looks like a fast Dc charger. I am right there you go.

Dc fast charger. So that bus would be Dc charging, whereas the four that we're looking at they're uh, Ac going in. but they convert them to Dc. That's very correct.

All right. Uh. tires. Andrew, Are these like special low energy ones like you have on regular Evs? Or are they just standard? No, they're a standard heavy vehicle type.

Standard heavy business. Gonna drive into the pit? Hopefully not into the pit? Oh well, not into it. Has anyone ever done that? Uh, no, No. Never happened.

Sure. First time for everything. could happen today. All right, we're going down under the pit here and this is something you won't see every day under an electric bus.

So yeah, what do we got here up here? Is our batteries right? Uh, all nice and covered up. We have our rear axle and we have our big hub motors and obviously, uh, you've got your rear braking booster. Nothing too different about that. Over here, we have our cooling system.

so we have a an oil to fluid coolant uh system to keep the motors cool so that gauge on the dash is just indicating the temperature of your motors, so there's there's a hub reduction. There's a hub reduction gear system in there, but apart from that, everything else, everything else is pretty conventional. From here forward, it's just a normal bus. Just normal bus.

Just a normal bus. Oh yeah, that one's got a nice new hose. somebody's replaced. that was that you.

Uh, yeah, that was you. Okay, it gets all pretty grimy under here, doesn't it? Yeah, uh. the roads are not. uh, not not kind, right? Especially when you hit something.

You get showered in it and these are your suspension. Yeah, these are the uh. torching rods. Yep.

airbags. nice soft ride sway bar. Big big sway bars. Oh yeah.

sway bar links. So a lot of this. All this stuff is is standard heavy heavy vehicle industry. So uh, like you'd get on any any normal normal bus, right? Except they got tiny little humber like they're remarkably small.

Aren't they the motors? I mean, yeah, they are just probably equivalent to, you know, a little bit bigger than what's on my Hyundai Ioniq. uh, which is 100 kilowatt motor. and that's about it. Yeah, 150 kilowatts, 150 kilowatts on the plate there? Yeah, All right, and 550 meters of torque.

150 kilowatts? Okay, there you go. Wow, that's the hub motor. Thank you very much Andrew for the underneath tour. Robbie is going to tell us about the other electric uh bus.

You've got the Utong. Can you tell us about that? Yeah, so we, uh, we had a Utong uh here on on trial. uh for a couple of months. Uh, I needed to have to buy another bus as a replacement and I got approval to replace a diesel bus with a Utong.

Uh, it's been in service now approximately nearly a year. I suppose it'll actually be the same length as current buses. Yeah, it may be a bit shorter. It's like holding versus forward with the drivers.

Some drivers prefer the Byd over the Utong. Battery capacity, battery distance tight, state of charge is very much similar to the Byd. Do we have range issues on either of these buses for daily commutes at all? No, not at all. When we first started the trial, I limit them to about uh, six to eight hours a day on short shifts.

I said that would run for around four to six weeks. After two weeks, I had confidence in the vehicles and we extended them out to probably 10 12 hour shifts. We ran that for a couple of weeks and now we extended that out to any any any in-service run they they can operate on. As I said before, we just treat them like a normal bus.

Now they do the same work and the same services as all our diesels. and uh, what state of charge do they come back to with after a typical day? So a typical day here is a little bit different when you're in our inner city area. Uh, an average eight hour shift or an eight hour day is only around 100 120 kilometers. Obviously, we've extended that out.

so they go out maybe three four times a day. They're averaging around 200 and 250 kilometers and that's around between 12 and 14 hour day. You've got to remember our congestion. We sit and don't move, so we spend a lot of time in traffic.

So hence the low kilometers. but the big shift or spread of hours for the shifts. Um, they generally come back with around between 30 and 40 percent charge left. Uh, they're regening.

They're regening around 30 to 40 percent. Uh, Regen, which was a lot higher than I actually expected with ours. With our routes being in a city, bus stops are very close. Um, so I did, um, have concerns in the early days that I thought we wouldn't get enough speed up to get Regen from stop to stop to stop, right? That's been totally opposite to what I what I expected.

Uh, the Regen has gone far above my expectations. Have we haven't had any failures on the electrical side of the thing like the motors, the, uh, the charges, the controllers anything like that? No, we haven't had any failures. Um, we've had some driver error failures which was water getting on the dash with the window left left open but from a hole and hole. Now we've had no failures.

We're currently running at 0.01 per k at the moment. It's the operating cost, which is, uh, compared to a gas bus. It's phenomenal, but it is early days. Any anything that we've had to do if there is a problem was covered by warranty and Andrew would have talked about the general servicing that we had to do and that's the only money that we've had to spend on these vehicles at this stage.

And uh, what's what's the top speed of this bad boy? Do you know you haven't taken it up? There depends depend on what, what, Uh, what speed zone I'm in right? Okay, but it gets, but it gets there very fast right? Does it have like a cruise control and all that, Uh, it does not have cruise control right? Does it have any other Um. safety features that you find on regular electric cars like lane guidance assistance and collision warning. All that fancy from standard that does not have any of that fitted right? It does have hill assist okay, which is which is quite good on some of the hilly streets of Sydney. Yep, My electric car's got like an auto hold uh, brake system so I can take my foot off the pedal when I'm stopped.

Does this have anything like that? Yes, that's good. It's got an auto hole. Oh okay, right. and it'll hold on hills as well.

Yes, oh great. But if you want to compare the um like the motor output to say like a Tesla Model S, Yep, let's do it. Tesla Model: This has a front and rear combined output of 615 kilowatts. So there are more powerful electric cars in this bus, but this thing can't.

But they can't haul. how many cars can it can fall? 27 standing people and 35 seating 35 seated? I don't think a Tesla can do that, but no failures in any of the charge controllers. Any of these boxes. None of those.

none of the magic boxes. You haven't had to put any of the electric smoke back in. Um, these are fitted with a fire suppression system as well. Oh, and up and up on the roof.

Okay, what is that under here? The fire space? Yes, we've got a detection line. Oh okay, right. And we've got nozzles here. Yep, and over there we're adding a dry chemical obviously not going to be water, right, and that will automatically just pump this entire section full of chemicals, dry chemicals.

And that'll be once the detection line is. uh, sensing that there's a fire. So is this a dedicated spot just for charging these? Oh yes it is. Yes, I mean it does.

It does get used during the day for other other workshop related activities, but um, the electric buses have priority place for charging. So what's the Uh efficiency figure in kilowatt hours per 100k? My my electric car gets about 11. So this is about a 110 give what give or take depending on driving conditions, right? So order magnitude more. but we are hauling a lot more.

What does this weigh again? I think we said fully loaded. It can be rated to 18 ton, 13.8 unloaded. so that's that actually is about the same efficiency. Uh, based on weight because mine? I don't know what.

one and a half tons this is ten times more. But and it uses ten times more energy, so efficiency is probably about the same. Yeah, nice. And uh.

what's the expected inspector? Battery life: Have you seen any dropping capacity? Do we know we haven't seen a drop in capacitive? They? They're rated to 22 000 cycles of the battery. All will obviously decrease gradually over time. They're warranted for eight years. Okay, that will decrease to no less than 60 percent.

And that and that doesn't mean that they're not going to be used, they'll just be repurposed. Uh, I think the the gentleman over at Byd says they will repurpose them for things like, uh, people's solar home setups. And there's lots of people who will buy use bad car Ev car battery packs. Yeah, they're not.

They're no longer good for the application that they have, but they've still got plenty of life in them. And everyone's been talking about wanting me to do a video on wireless road charging. And it's kind of like the solar roadways thing. It works, but it's not going to be practical.

When the buses come back here, they've got the range they've got. They come back at the end of the day they come to a known location, You plug them in, you can get a super efficient, uh, direct charge straight into the battery. There's just absolutely no point to have like a bus lanes charging wireless charging coils under bus lanes in roads. It doesn't really solve any practical problem, it's just pointless.

It's solar roadways all over again. Okay, tell us about the instrument, uh display here. So we have uh, left and right. uh, motor motor temperature.

We have, uh, state of charge obviously? uh. gear selector, power draw. So currently we're sitting at four kilowatts of draw because we've got the air con on even though we're idle. So yes, yep.

and obviously that'll include the, uh, the draw for the power steering, pump, air compressor. Yeah, and all those types of things. Um, because they run on the the high voltage side and we have our low voltage. uh, low voltage battery.

So it's got a regular bus battery so that operates all the all the normal things. interior lights, indicators, dash lights, horn. Um, all of the things that, uh, a conventional bus has and uh, it's got an Rpm indicator Does that? Yes, that's the the motor rpm. Okay, so it does.

Actually, Is that just familiarity for the drivers? Because you don't really need to know that, do you? Uh, not. particularly. There's no, uh, no need to. Yeah, that's uh.

I guess. a choice by Byd and the those top gauges up there. red and green top gauges. Oh, that's so your operational air pressure.

So uh, your primary tank and your secondary tank. So I'm using the air pressure, right? and that's I'm pumping that up. But apart from that, fairly conventional. uh for a bus.

Yeah, pretty pretty standard. Nothing really. uh, other than the the the electric motor that differs from air from any other bus. Size-wise it's the same, but there's no gear in in this.

It's just drive and that's it. Yep, just put it in d and off you go. Yep, you won't hear a gear change. And there's a fire suppression system here.

They've never had to use it, but there's uh, fire suppression systems for the uh, battery packs and also the controllers in the back. just buttons for drive, neutral, reverse, and uh, it's looks. Got a radio and not much else. Looks like a pretty much a conventional bus and we've got various Uh cameras up here.

We've got one on each door, one for the bus and rear and front as well. and we've got radio systems and air cons and aircon controller. Pretty much a conventional bus. Andrew's going to take us for a ride.

Let's go. Oh, that's smooth. Wow. Very little vibration.

Well, there's nothing really is there. It's just rocking. So how does this uh, compare and you're driving around the deeper? uh, definitely quieter, right? Do people not hear it coming? Or um. Well, yeah, they don't hear it coming.

But at the speeds we're driving in the depot, you can obviously hear the the tyre noise. Entire noise. The tyre noise would be the main noise, wouldn't it? I mean so how often do these come back to the Uh depot every day? Uh, yes. So they go out in the morning and they come back around 9, 30, 10 o'clock They get put on charge.

Uh. and then they go back out again in the afternoon peak. So this is a Type 2, uh, three phase charger 480 volts, 63 amps and they've got two of them, Uh, I assume that each one goes to uh, the separate Uh pack and it's just a regular. Um, you know, like high power three phase type two charger and you simply just they've got these dedicated stations here.

Just plug it in after it comes back from its shift and it's ready. It's good to go for another, you know, day or even two depending on the usage requirements of this thing. So on the Gammalang Byd, the charging is in the side. It has two charges for the battery packs on the roof and the battery packs underneath.

So they charge individually, but then they combine. They combine their power source to run the motors and everything else. So these are the charges. Oh, dual wielding dual welding.

Got to go the double barrel. It's plugged in so it should come up with stator charge and and also how long before it's fully charged. 424 volts, Ac 55 amps I know, 108. it's just got in the other one and estimated it's 55 minutes to charge.

So once the charging process starts, it will turn on the fans to keep the the battery packs cool as well so it automatically. Uh, does the cooling as it's charging. There is the Regen system adjustable so the driver can adjust the regen or the driver cannot adjust the regen. It is set, but it's usually set for the, um, the routes it's going to operate on in theory.

Could you operate this as a single pedal without using the brake? Can you will? Will it come to a full stop right in? What sort of distance will it depending on speed? But if you're doing 20 kilometers an hour, you'll stop within a couple of meters. Oh okay, yeah, it's pretty aggressive. That's a decent amount of regen. Yeah, it's very aggressive.

So in bus world, um, we've got retarders on diesel buses does the same thing. Oh yeah, so bus drivers are used to that sort kind of driving. I was going to ask where they're not using the brake pedal so much. Yeah, okay, so it's not that different.

Drive for them? No, not really. No, really. it gets off the mark a lot quicker than any diesel bus. But yeah, in terms of stopping, it's basically the same.

And we're in the live control room here where they get real-time reports and monitoring from the buses and control the network. But we're now going to have a look at the Veracity system and how that monitors the real-time data from the buses. you.