Chinese battery giant BYD is inviting towns and cities in Germany to ‘test drive’ a fleet of new electric buses powered by the company’s LiFePO4 batteries.
The initiative is in partnership with Bavarian-based e-storage specialist Fenecon, which said the batteries give the buses “a range of about 300 kilometres travelling up to 70km per hour on a full load time of about five hours”.
Fenecon CEO Franz-Josef Feilmeier (pictured) told BBB: “The prismatic LFP batteries with very high cycle life provide clear advantages in lifetime, especially for vehicles which run almost one cycle per day and in a 1C application.”
Feilmeier said the batteries being used for the project come from BYD’s existing 16GWh annual production capacity.
Fenecon is mainly targeting B2B clients for BYD’s electric vehicles— offering a “full-service and one-stop-shop solution for car and bus fleets as well as all necessary charging infrastructure”, Feilmeier added.
The 12-metre long ‘BYD-12m’ low-floor car vehicles for the European market are being built at BYD’s plant in Hungary and manufactured in Shenzhen for the Chinese market.
One advantage of the battery system is that the entire passenger area— comprising 26 seats and 42 standing places— “is free of battery compartments”, Fenecon said. “The equipment for passengers also offers state-of-the-art technology with a 380kWh battery, LED lights and automatic fire extinguishing system. More than 10,000 units of different configurations are already successful in use around the globe.”
Cities are being invited to try out the BYD buses under “discounted conditions” up to 30 March 2018.
The BYD-Fenecon partnership dates back several years, during which Fenecon has also distributed BYD’s residential lithium-ion energy storage systems in Germany.
