Electric warriors

Battery bus behemoth BYD is booming. John Lewis reports from China on a global success story 

The scale Chinese electric bus manufacturer BYD (Build Your Dreams) operates at and its ambitions can be illustrated by two figures – the 100,000 cells a day produced by its highly-automated traction battery plant in Kengzi, China, and the massive order for 6,200 buses the company is currently fulfilling.

They are all going into service in China with municipal operator Guangzhou Public Transport. [wlm_nonmember][…]

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A mixture of 8m, 10m and 12m K7, K8 and K9 single-deckers with gross weights of up to 18.5 tonnes, they have a range of between 300km and 320km before their lithium-iron-phosphate battery packs require recharging, says BYD.

Some 4,000 of them are being constructed at BYD’s factory at Shanwei while the remainder are being built in Guangzhou, the capital of a province in the south of the country. Work on the order began in November 2017 and it should be completed by September 2020.

With a production capacity of 3,000 units a year, the Shanwei site started building buses in May 2016. Made up of two linked plants, it is about two-and-half hours’ drive from BYD’s headquarters in the sprawling metropolis of Shenzhen, not far from Hong Kong.

Expanding rapidly with construction underway everywhere, officially Shenzhen is home to 16 million people, although in reality the total is apparently closer to 20 million.

The 16,000-plus buses that service them are all electric and have been since last year, while all 20,000 of the city’s taxis will be battery-powered by the end of this year.

BYD was encouraged by the Chinese government to build a factory in Shanwei, an area where economic opportunities for local people have been lacking, through a mixture of tax breaks and funding for employee training.

With chassis made from high-strength steel and aluminium used to construct the roof, sides, front and rear, the low-entry wheelchair-accessible Guangzhou single-deckers have a capacity of up to 78 passengers depending on the model.

A number of the seats have USB points and the passengers doors are pneumatically rather than electrically actuated.

A high proportion of the components the vehicles contain are made in-house by BYD itself, which presses the aluminium panels used as well as supplying the batteries.

The Kengzi plant is similarly self-sustaining, with raw materials coming in at one end and completed nickel-manganese-cobalt (NMC) and lithium-iron-phosphate (LFP) batteries emerging at the other.

With a mere 200 workers, the plant operates 24/7 and stops for just one day a month for maintenance. It takes a month to produce each cell – the process involves keeping it at 45°C for several days to ensure it does not fail – and there are 320 of them in a K9.

Overseas sales rise
The size of the Guangzhou order makes BYD’s overseas sales look modest by comparison, but the company is determined to increase them.

To date it has sold over 600 buses across Europe, says BYD Europe Managing Director, Isbrand Ho. “Our aim is to electrify transport,” he said.

It has a European market share of around 22%.

Sixty of its buses will be in service in Italy by the end of the year (they are already in operation in cities such as Milan and Turin) while 42 18m articulated buses equipped with pantograph charging should arrive in Oslo, Norway’s capital, during the second quarter of 2019.

Two BYD artics have been running in Oslo since last December.

Looking further afield, in Canada BYD has inked a deal to supply 10 40-foot electric buses to the Toronto Transit Commission. An order for a further 30 could be in the pipeline.

Still in North America, in the USA BYD operates a factory in Lancaster, California, with over 800 workers.

It has recently won the state of Georgia’s state-wide contracts for public mass transit and transportation vehicles, specifically for battery-electric buses.

Leveraging the state’s purchasing power, local government bodies and transit agencies can benefit from the convenience and competitive pricing of these pre-established agreements.

In addition, BYD won a bid to become one of the suppliers of the city of Atlanta’s electric vehicles, including buses.

UK growth
In the UK, over 200 buses using BYD electric technology are running in London.

Others are in operation in Nottinghamshire and Liverpool, and BYD recently set up offices and a service centre in Iver, Buckinghamshire, close to Heathrow Airport and the M4 and M25.

At the time of writing, BYD and ADL had between them just won the lion’s share of London’s first order for fully-electric double-deckers.

In total, 37 10.9m ADL Enviro400EVs with City-style bodywork and glazed staircases will enter service with Metroline in the second quarter of next year.

A joint venture with ADL set up in 2015 means that BYD provides the platform for the vehicles while ADL provides the bodies.

The vehicles are assembled in the UK by ADL.

“The BYD/ADL partnership has a 90%-plus share of the London market for electric buses and a 50% share of the UK market,” said Isbrand.

Furthermore, some 105 Enviro400EV Cities look set to be operating with Stagecoach in Greater Manchester by early 2020.

Stagecoach is contributing £34.6m to the £56.1m initiative, which includes the necessary supporting infrastructure, but the plan depends on £21.5m from the government’s recently-announced Ultra-Low Emission Bus Scheme.

The double-deckers will have an estimated range of up to approximately 190 miles and a capacity of around 80 passengers.

They will replace Euro III and Euro IV diesels and should cut annual CO2 emissions by 6,800 tonnes, NOx by 24% and particulates by 20%.

ADL/BYD buses are appearing further afield. In April, the first two 12m 55-passenger Enviro200EVs debuted in Auckland, New Zealand’s biggest city, on the CityLink service.

Regenerative braking converts part of the kinetic energy into electricity and stores it in the battery to boost the bus’ range.

Said Liu Xueliang, General Manager of BYD’s Asia Pacific Auto Sales Division: “We’re excited about our New Zealand market debut.

These buses are quieter, cleaner and better for the environment and I’m confident their versatility will enable them to meet the requirements of the Auckland duty cycle easily.”

European presence
BYD has had a bus factory in Komarom, Hungary since April 2017, which will assemble upwards of 60 buses this year. It aims to use it to construct 400 annually on two shifts.

It will open another one in Beauvais, France in the coming months, with a target annual output of 200 buses and over 100 jobs to be created in the initial stage.

BYD has 400 employees at its European headquarters in Rotterdam in the Netherlands. “We’ve got an R&D team in Rotterdam and we’re now looking for all types of engineers to join it, including both hardware and software engineers,” said Isbrand.

BYD will be making a number of announcements about its approach to bus design at the IAA Hanover Commercial Vehicle Show in Germany later this month.

Now the biggest electric bus manufacturer in the world – it built 15,000 in 2017 – BYD started life as a battery producer back in 1995 with just 20 people.

Today, it has over 220,000 employees – 20,000 of whom are research and development engineers – and an annual turnover of £15.3bn.

A public company listed on the Shenzhen and Hong Kong stock exchanges, it boasts American business magnate Warren Buffett as its second-biggest shareholder and over 14,000 patents.

Founder and Chairman, Wang Chuanfu, recently told Western journalists at the company’s headquarters how impressed he is by the commitment shown by European bus operators to cutting pollution – and by their growing commitment to zero-emission electric buses.

The Chinese government too is supporting electric vehicles because it recognises the contribution they can make to cleaning up the environment, he adds. “They’re having a tremendous impact on air quality and climate change,” he observed.

“Eight years ago people viewed it all with disbelief,” he added. “But the change is now really apparent, the electric transport era has arrived and is growing faster and faster judging by the demand we are seeing.”

Demise of diesel
“Come back to China in five years’ time and you won’t see a diesel bus,” remarked Isbrand. “Electrification is a done deal as several countries worldwide have announced a deadline for the sale of cars with internal combustion engines to end,” said Wang Chuanfu.

Batteries produced in vast quantities for a wide variety of applications remain at the heart of BYD’s success.

Next year it will open its third battery factory in China, in Qinghai province – an area rich in lithium says BYD – which the company contends will be the largest battery factory in the world. It will cover an area the size of 140 football pitches.

“It’s easy to build a battery in your kitchen but a lot more difficult to build 10,000 of them to a consistent standard,” mused Isbrand.

“Most vehicle manufacturers treat batteries as just another solid component, but they are not,” he added.

“They’re a mixture of electronics and chemicals and that makes it hard to get them to keep working for five or 10 years.

“Creating them is a scientific art and you have to be able to manage the ageing process they undergo.”

The only vehicle manufacturer to begin life as a battery producer, BYD favours LFP batteries for use in buses because of their high degree of safety, says Ho.

“If a lithium-iron-phosphate battery receives a heavy impact, is punctured or crushed then all it will do is smoke,” he observed. “It won’t start a fire.”

Other types of battery technology may offer more energy density, he agrees, but safety has to be paramount when you have 80 or 90 people on board.

The batteries are typically guaranteed for five years and the best way to ensure they stay healthy is to use an extended recharging cycle spread over four hours, he says.

Shorter recharging cycles of, say, an hour’s duration are possible, he agrees, but will have implications for battery life.

“That’s because they involve a higher current; and the higher the current you charge at, the shorter the life of the battery.

“It’s a bit like eating five steaks a day,” he added. “If you keep doing that then you won’t last very long.”

Nor does using LFP batteries restrict the range of urban buses unduly, he insists, with buses in service with Go-Ahead in London able to do a day’s work and still have 25% of their charge left.

Research is being conducted into both nickel-cadmium and sodium-ion batteries for bus applications nevertheless, says a senior BYD engineer, with the former’s high energy density giving it a definite appeal.

But LFP’s safety benefits mean that it is likely to reign supreme in this sector of the market for some time to come – and continued development means the range offered is gradually improving.

Range is of course a concern for coach firms; while the 200km range of BYD’s C9 coach might make it viable for commuter work, it means that deploying it on touring work would be problematic.

“The level of interest isn’t quite there yet among operators and we really need a longer range to increase its appeal,” Isbrand observed.

Nor does BYD want to build coaches for sale in the UK in China, he added; it would rather work with a local partner instead. Plaxton would appear to be an obvious bet given BYD’s close links with ADL.

Heating and air-conditioning can drain battery capacity but there are ways of mitigating their effect, says the manufacturer.

Pre-heating the bus’ interior prior to departure makes sense so that the driver does not have to draw large amounts of energy from the batteries first thing in the morning to ensure the interior temperature is comfortable for passengers.

Tailoring the air-conditioning system to the temperature that prevails in the country the bus is operating in makes sense too; whatever is installed in a bus operating in, say, France does not need to be as powerful as the package that may be required by a customer in Saudi Arabia for example.

BYD is considering using CO2 as an air-conditioning refrigerant, but remains concerned about the comparative expense and the maintenance costs that may be incurred.

Going driverless
Will buses have drivers in the future? “We will always have a driver in the bus – we need to think about passenger safety – but we may end up calling him a bus ambassador,” said Joe Ma, Deputy General Manager at operator Shenzhen Bus Group (SBG), the biggest of the city’s three bus fleets.

What he is referring to is the degree to which a rising level of autonomy is likely to take over the driver’s existing functions. “We’ve got four buses on trial in Shenzhen operating at Level 1 on public roads in mixed traffic,” he said.

According to the Society of Automotive Engineers (SAE), Level 1 describes a situation where the driver still controls the vehicle but benefits from some assistance features. “We’re aiming to go to Level 2, and to Level 3 by the end of the year,” he observed.

Both involve increased degrees of automation but fall some way short of full autonomy. “Scania is one of our partners in developing this technology,” Joe said.

What about Level 5, which would make a bus capable of running completely autonomously? “The technology is almost there but requires a suitable infrastructure and a lot of the other vehicles on the highway need to be self-driving too,” he replied.

He believes that Level 5 would be unlikely to appear before 2025 so far as buses are concerned.

When SBG’s urban fleet became fully electric last year, it made it the biggest all-electric bus fleet in the world. It runs almost 5,700 city buses, nearly 4,400 of which were supplied by BYD, and the fleet roster includes 30 10.2m double-deckers.

“They’re especially good for advertising,” Joe smiled. The majority however are 10.5m single-deckers. The other bus suppliers are Chinese manufacturers Nanjing Jinlong and Shenzhen-based Wuzhoulong.

The fleet is fed by 101 DC charging stations with 1,665 charging posts. “We’re the only Chinese member of UITP,” Joe observed – the International Association of Public Transport.

The average passenger number per bus per day is 237 and the vehicle-in-service rate is 99.2%. Average daily revenue per bus is £66.

SBG was originally set up in 1975. In 2004 Hong Kong’s Kowloon Motor Bus became its second-biggest shareholder with a 35% stake; the bulk of the share capital is state-owned.

With some 2,800 employees and around £1bn of assets, the 12,000-plus vehicles SBG is responsible for includes a fleet of taxis. “By the end of the year all 4,700 of them will be electric,” said Joe.

Providing the cab drivers with sufficient charging points and ensuring they know when they will be free will be a challenge, he says.

“We’re looking at introducing an app which will tell them where there is one vacant,” he commented.

Just the ticket
SBG is the biggest shareholder in Shenzhen’s Shenzhentong travel card which can be purchased at locations such as 7-11 convenience stores.

Alternatively, travellers can use an app on their smartphone as a payment mechanism, and around 7.7m of them do so regularly.

Travellers can still pay the bus driver in cash instead if they so wish.

“So far as cutting emissions is concerned, we started off with 10 diesel-electric hybrid buses back in 2008,” said Joe.

“Then in 2011 we put our first 100 fully-electric buses on the road. Despite what Isbrand said earlier, SBG typically recharges its buses in less than two hours using fast charging.

“We try to do so at night because the electricity is a lot cheaper,” Joe said.

“A full charge gives us a 200km range,” he continued.

“As a consequence we sometimes have to recharge a bus for half-an-hour during the day if it’s being put on one of our longer routes.

“Our energy costs are well over 50% lower than they would be if we still ran diesels,” he observed.

One of the 10.5m single-deckers referred to earlier will use £7.97 worth of electricity to travel 100km. Most of the electricity is generated by Shenzen’s nuclear power station, although some of the energy comes from solar panels at the charging points.

The 10.5m’s nearest diesel equivalent will burn £22.77 worth of fuel to go the same distance.

Maintenance costs are significantly down too, says Joe. Over eight years, a 10.5m single-decker costs almost £5,700 less to look after than one of the 11m diesel single-deckers it has replaced, he comments.

A reduction in the demand for service and repair work means that its in-house workshops have the capacity to look after electric vehicles operated by third parties – a valuable extra source of revenue.

The 10.5m buses are a lot heavier than their 11m diesel counterparts. “We’re talking 12.8 tonnes compared with 11.5 tonnes,” said Joe.

BYD warrants the batteries it fits to the group’s buses for eight years, which mirrors the life-span of the vehicles with SBG. They are written down to zero during that time.

The warranty is triggered if a battery drops to below 80% of its original charging capacity and there have been some instances of this happening, Joe reports.

Many of the diesel buses that were replaced were only three or four years old and still had plenty of life left in them. Not all of them have departed however.

SBG still has 300, and uses diesels on its cross-border services into Hong Kong – the border stays open 24/7 – rather than electric vehicles because there are no recharging points on the Hong Kong side.

The fleet has run some buses powered by liquefied natural gas in the past. “However we didn’t think they offered much of an advantage over diesel,” he said.

Surprisingly to UK eyes, the SBG fleet is not wheelchair-accessible. In China there is no law that requires it to be, and two-step access is the order of the day.

In addition to its 770 fixed routes SBG is now offering a flexible, dynamic service which allows passengers to book seats using a smartphone app. It is not built around conventional routes or stops, but responds directly to customer demand.

“It’s the direction bus travel will move in,” said Joe.

SBG is proud of its safety record. “In 2017 we saw just 0.21 serious injuries per 1 million kilometres, down from 0.37 in the previous year,” he reported.

Recruiting and retaining drivers is a perennial problem, he admits.

“The salaries we can afford to pay are not high when compared with those earned by other professional buyers and dealing with the travelling public is not always easy,” he observed. Average age of a driver? “Around 43,” Joe replied.

On the rails
BYD builds electric cars, vans and trucks as well as buses and coaches and supplies batteries to third-party customers such as forklift truck manufacturer Jungheinrich; and its mass passenger transport ambitions are not confined to the public highway.

It has signed a £680m deal to construct a 20km-long monorail system for the Brazilian city of Salvador, which will be partially built above the sea to connect to an offshore island.

The city’s 3.8m residents should be able to use the company’s SkyRail monorail, which will be linked to the city’s existing subway network, from 2021 onwards.

“A monorail can be constructed at one-fifth of the price of a subway and in one-third of the time,” Wang Chuanfu stated.

SkyRail already operates in the Chinese city of Yinchuan.

The company has built a 1.1km-long monorail line at its headquarters to demonstrate its capabilities with a three-car SkyRail train that can reach 50mph.

BYD has also developed SkyShuttle – an electric tram with rubber wheels that also runs on an elevated track.

Passengers like systems such as SkyRail and SkyShuttle believes Wang Chuanfu, because it means they are riding at a height of between 12m to 15m.

“Ask yourself if you would rather work in the basement or in an office at the top of the building,” he remarked.

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Travelling to China 

Entering China as a journalist is not easy. You need a special visa in advance, and if you cannot furnish all the required documentation – in this case including a written invitation from the company you are going to see as well as evidence that you have a return flight booked – there is no guarantee you will get one.

Filling in the visa application form and ensuring the correct size and type of photograph is attached requires some care too; especially if, like the writer, you were refused a visa in the past.

Once I got there after a 12-hour flight and crossed the border from Hong Kong to China – which involved having my finger prints taken electronically not once, but twice just to make sure – everything went remarkably well, despite near-unceasing rain and a lot of traffic congestion.

Shenzhen is a booming city and its roads are becoming increasingly busy as a consequence, and the growing prosperity of much of the local population is reflected in the upmarket cars so many of them drive.

There was no shortage of Audis, Mercedes-Benz and Range Rovers alongside locally-produced models, including the Trumpchi SUV, believe it or not. The word apparently means legend…
Persuading the local inhabitants to take the bus rather than the car could end up being a challenge for bus operators in the coming years.

BYD is clearly determined to become a global powerhouse so far as zero-emission transport is concerned. All the visits to BYD’s various locations in and around Shenzhen went pretty much according to plan, and BYD’s executives were remarkably open about their company and its performance – albeit for the most part working through translators.

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